multi-language plugin - help needed/feature request

[carl_galloway]

I've started using the multi-language plugin and noticed that it inserts the relevant language link into the entry footer, but for some reason the sidebar language selector doesn't seem to work(EDIT: It does work, just not the way I expected). Ideally I would like users to be able to select all posts written in their language. How do I do this?

Also, I'd like to remove the language links from the entry footer and place them under the entry title, but still leave the rest of the entry footer below the entry, and then I'd like to replace the text links with flag icons. Is this possible?

My blog now has two German language posts, and I am hoping to add Russian soon. No doubt translations into other languages will also be sent to me, so I really need this to work. Thanks for any help,

Carl

[garvinhicking]

When a user changes his language via the sidebar dropdown, he'll see all the multilingual entries in his language already. But we cannot filter out the entries without bilingual content, because that would mean a major shift in serendipity's fetching entry routine. And I think most users would want to see other entries as well? Tough usability question. I, as a user, would not want to miss english articles on the blog.

As for your suggestion about placement: Good idea! Just committed a new version where you can toggle betwen 'add_footer' and 'multilingual_footer' for the target placement, so that you can put it differently inside your template. I also added 'multilingual_XXX' classes for each language so that you can use CSS to add background-images with the corresponding flags.

Best regards,
Garvin

[carl_galloway]

Thanks Garvin, now I have to go and upgrade my normal blog from 0.91. Also, I take your point about users wanting all entries, so will restructure my blog.

[carl_galloway]

ok, I'm lost, how do I place the plugin outside of the normal entry footer. I can't figure out what variable to call. Using serendipity_showPlugin just seems to output some html that places the text 'Multilingual entries' into a container div. I must be doing something wrong, and haven't done this before so am completely lost.

Thanks

Carl

[garvinhicking]

Oh, I'm sorry

You first need to download the new version of the multilingual event plugin. I think SF.Net CVS might need another few hours until it's updated...ah, no. I just checked. It's there: http://cvs.sourceforge.net/viewcvs.py/p ... tilingual/

Once you've updated the plugin, enter its configuration and set the config switch for the placement to "multilingual_footer".

In your entries.tpl you now just need to put {$entry.multilingual_footer} where you want it.

Sorry for not being verbose on this issue, I am currently doing too many things at once.

Best regards,
Garvin

[carl_galloway]

(hands in air, waving and singing) brilliant - thank you, have a good night.

Carl

[carl_galloway]

The translation of entries is gathering pace, and my first Russian translation has been sent to me =ru]by Gleb Reys

Unfortunately, the entry title is not showing up in Russian characters. Has anyone else faced this problem, and how do I fix it?

[carl_galloway]

Having trouble with the multilingual plugin handling the Russian translation. The page is =ru]here

Notice the title isn't showing up in cyrillic script. Garvin tells me this is an error with the way the utf-8 is handled by my browser. Check out the phpmyadmin image of the entries in the database.

So, my question is this, I'm using fifrefox 1.5 on Windows XP and can't figure out how to get utf-8 encoding to work the way it should. Any suggestions?

Carl

[garvinhicking]

How are you inserting those characters? Via Copy & paste? If yes, you should make sure to copy+paste from a UTF-8 document...?!

The database holds the HTML entities; those should not be in there. The UTF-8 characters should be there!

Try to insert a german "ä", "ö" and check if they are inserted as UTF-8 two-byte characters?

Best regards,
Garvin

[carl_galloway]

Yes I did copy and paste, from an email from Gleb. Funny thing is that all the German entries were copied/pasted the same way and all the German characters come out fine.

Garvin, in a private email you suggest looking at whether the table collation is utf-8, not sure how to check this. Would it help if I gave you access to the phpmyadmin so you can have a hunt around? If you have the time?

[garvinhicking]

Maybe it would help if you (temporarily) give me a blog user access to your blog and forward me the mail with the russian characters, then I could try a few things?

At this point I'm not sure if the collation is responsible for it. If your phpMyAdmin does not show it, you're not using MySQL 4.1+

Regards,
Garvin

[carl_galloway]

Garvin has found the problem with my blog, thank you.

The reason is that I had not set charset selection to utf-8. I was still using native. As Garvin pointed out to me, this works fine in single language blogs but doesn't work so well with multilingual blogs. I'll have to go and check every single post and make some changes, but my blog should now be back to normal again in a few days. This will be very exciting for my Russian visitors who will soon be able to see my Serendipity entries, and in fact my whole blog, in their native language.

Thanks to everyone who has helped me with this.

[carl_galloway]

May I make another suggestion with the multi-language plugin. The actual text that reads German, English, is it possible to change this so that it the language name is translated into the correct text and also the correct utf-8. German readers would know that German means Deutsch, but I wonder about other languages, especially if latin script isn't used.

By the way, can anyone point me to some nice looking flag icons that I could use for the background image? Most of the icons I've seen are much too big and very glossy.

[d_cee]

Hi Carl

I've used these on client jobs
http://www.clickfire.com/content/graphi ... _icons.php

or have I misunderstood and you want a big image?

Dave