It took me 5 minutes to implement so that was a breeze.
The only "problem" I see with this is that the tree is going to be messy when there are subpages to the translated page. Every page is going to have subfolders with translation which can be confusing for the user.
Thank you for trying out the package and for your comments!
I think that you are right about things potentially getting messy when there are many subpages. I have been using this method for a year before turning it into a package. What our users do to avoid the problem, is keep the Translations folder on top of each sub-tree. This way they always have a feel of what it is by convention:
The other thing I do to make things look neater is use the "Setting Language" icon as the icon for all Translation document types. This way the translations don't get confused for normal pages:
How do you work with usercontrols? Today I use Umbracos internal dictionary to fetch the right translation depending on the applied language of that node. is that still possible?
What if you dont want to show a page on e.g the english page only on the swedish? Say that you have products just for the local market and dont want to display it in the global market. Is that possible?
About the url, unfortunately it does not change according the language. The only difference between the two versions is the lang=xx parameter. However, I have noticed multilingual pages made like that show up on google. For example, looking for something in German could make a page be returned the only difference of which with the main page is the ?lang=de parameter. Of course I am not saying that this is perfect neither am I an expert in search engine optimisation, but anyway, just wanted to mention it :)
About the user controls, yes the internal dictionary should work if you use the umbraco.library.GetDictionaryItem, because the Language Selector macro also sets the culture according to the selected language. I have tested this, but if you encounter any difficulties with it let me know.
I am afraid that it is not possible to hide pages depending on languages, at least not in the current version. It was developed in order to make sure that everyone sees the same structure, regardless of the selected language.
I was just thinking that, as a matter of fact, there is something that might help hiding nodes not translated to specific languages. In the assembly installed by the package (Dimi.Polyglot.dll) there exists this method:
It returns true if a translation in the given language (languageISOCode) exists for the page with the given Id (NodeID). Otherwise it returns false. Perhaps you could use this in a script that handles navigation, to hide links to nodes which have not been translated in the selected language? Please note however that this method will still return true if the translation exists but has not been published.
Nice package!
This is an aweseme package!
It took me 5 minutes to implement so that was a breeze.
The only "problem" I see with this is that the tree is going to be messy when there are subpages to the translated page. Every page is going to have subfolders with translation which can be confusing for the user.
Anyone else see any drawbacks with this package?
Hello froad!
Thank you for trying out the package and for your comments!
I think that you are right about things potentially getting messy when there are many subpages. I have been using this method for a year before turning it into a package. What our users do to avoid the problem, is keep the Translations folder on top of each sub-tree. This way they always have a feel of what it is by convention:
The other thing I do to make things look neater is use the "Setting Language" icon as the icon for all Translation document types. This way the translations don't get confused for normal pages:
I hope that this helps!
Dimitri
Good points, and I suppose that the user gets comfortable with this after a while.
What about SEO? Is every page goint to get a unique URL and is the translated page going to get the same pagename in the url? For example, i have a page that has the address www.ourcompany.com/about-us, is that page going to get www.ourcompany.com/about-us/?lang=sv or could I get it to have the URL www.ourcompany.com/om-oss/?lang=sv ?
How do you work with usercontrols? Today I use Umbracos internal dictionary to fetch the right translation depending on the applied language of that node. is that still possible?
Another question:
What if you dont want to show a page on e.g the english page only on the swedish? Say that you have products just for the local market and dont want to display it in the global market. Is that possible?
About the url, unfortunately it does not change according the language. The only difference between the two versions is the lang=xx parameter. However, I have noticed multilingual pages made like that show up on google. For example, looking for something in German could make a page be returned the only difference of which with the main page is the ?lang=de parameter. Of course I am not saying that this is perfect neither am I an expert in search engine optimisation, but anyway, just wanted to mention it :)
About the user controls, yes the internal dictionary should work if you use the umbraco.library.GetDictionaryItem, because the Language Selector macro also sets the culture according to the selected language. I have tested this, but if you encounter any difficulties with it let me know.
I am afraid that it is not possible to hide pages depending on languages, at least not in the current version. It was developed in order to make sure that everyone sees the same structure, regardless of the selected language.
I was just thinking that, as a matter of fact, there is something that might help hiding nodes not translated to specific languages. In the assembly installed by the package (Dimi.Polyglot.dll) there exists this method:
Dimi.Polyglot.BLL.DocumentTranslation.TranslationNodeExists(NodeID, languageISOCode)
It returns true if a translation in the given language (languageISOCode) exists for the page with the given Id (NodeID). Otherwise it returns false. Perhaps you could use this in a script that handles navigation, to hide links to nodes which have not been translated in the selected language? Please note however that this method will still return true if the translation exists but has not been published.
In case it helps, I have just released the documentation of the API of the package. Please check the Downloads section on Codeplex.
Thank you for your information!
I will look in to this.
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