Users can already do separate blogs for different languages. It's also
possible for sophisticated users to do templates that are
language-sensitive. We could facilitate this route, possibly with added
macro support.
Users can already write content in different languages, even mixing it.
The main thing we might want to add is a way for users to label entries
by language and allow viewers to filter entries by language label. Not
sure of all of the implied features this might call for.
--a.
Allen Gilliland wrote:
This is different from the language issues on the editor interface.
In the near future I'd like to look at adding support for publishing
entries in multiple languages and effectively allowing someone to
maintain their blog in multiple languages. This has been an item on the
table for a while, but I think it's time to get it implemented.
There are a variety of ways to approach this problem so I wanted to
start a general discussion to see which approach we like. This is just
off the top of my head right now, but here's some possibilities ...
1. Let users create separate blogs for different langauges. This is
easy on us because we don't have to do any work, but forces users to
maintain multiple copies of everything in a weblog. i.e. duplicating
templates, categories, bookmarks, etc.
2. Allow users to publish an entry multiple times and just change the
entry locale. We would then make the weblog display logic be language
sensative, so that you are typically only viewing a blog in one language
at a time. Pros: the only real work is making our display servlets
language sensitive. Cons: each translated entry would have it's own
anchor, which we may not want. we also wouldn't know that an entry has
multiple translations because there is nothing tying each entry
translation together.
3. Same approach as #2, except that we would try and tie each
translation of the content to a single weblog entry record. This means
that there would only be one url for the entry, but it could possibly be
displayed in many languages. Pros: this is the most streamlined
approach and ensures there is only one permalink for the entry. Cons:
this requires quite a bit more work and likely a data model change.
this could also cause potential problems because the anchor and category
for the entry can really only exist in a single language, which would
not be true for option #2. i'm also not sure if having the same url
exist in multiple languages is ideal, it could cause issues with search
engines and indexing content, etc.
i think that covers the basic options, but if anyone can think of others
please chime in. i think we should go with either option #2 or #3 and
both of those require some updating on the weblog display process to
support viewing a weblog in multiple languages, so I plan to start there
while we work out the details on how best to store translated entry
data.
thoughts? comments?
-- Allen
