[uportal-dev] multi-language issues that were closed

[Vangel V. Ajanovski]

Hi everyone. I wanted to discuss (again) these three issues that I raised in 2006, started a discussion here, proposed some solution, but they were never fixed, the development moved to UP3 and now are closed because they are supposedly not applicable to UP3. http://www.ja-sig.org/issues/browse/UP-1433 http://www.ja-sig.org/issues/browse/UP-1434 http://www.ja-sig.org/issues/browse/UP-1435 OK, I think this needs an explanation before everything else. The general idea of my propositions is that when you build a multilingual portal, not all of the tabs and all of the portlets are applicable for all users and not all of them have the same content in all languages. This is especially true for the unauthenticated visitors. For example we now have a bilingual portal and we have tab "Information" which should have 3 portlets when viewed in English and have 7 portlets when viewed in Macedonian. Second, some of the portlets/channels and tabs that are present both in the English and Macedonian language, should have different title and different content. This can be argued that in such case it is not the same portlet, but a different one - which leads to the first problem of having a different set of portlets for different language. And again there is no solution for the tabs. Third, when portlet-proxying legacy applications, the relevant language should be shown, depending on the chosen language in the portal. For these reasons, I investigated and found an intermediate solution that was serving us for 3.5 years. But now we want to move to UP3, and again the same problems :) My most crucial proposition was that both the structure transform and the theme transform should be locale aware, while now only the theme transform is. To enable this in UP2 you would have to make a change in UserInstance, now in UP3 I think the change should be made in StaticRenderingPipeline. It is a very simple change by itself and is documented in UP-1434 where I posted the required patch. There is a catch in this. The cache does not take the locale into account as part of the key, so it has to be disabled. So a change in the cache key has to be made. I don't know where and how to do this. This is most important for all the other requirements, because this will enable portal implementors to create/change new/existing structural XSL-s to be language aware and if needed construct a different structure and afterwards apply a different theme to different languages. This is imporant because even the theme can change (translation of institution logo, login/logout links, etc). So automatically (with added documentation how to do this) UP-1435 willl be solved. The third proposition was to enable the CWebProxy and (now) the other WebProxy channels and portlets, to retrieve content from different links for different languages. In our case this is done like this: - We configure a CWebProxy instance with link http://server/file.html - CWebProxy retrieves http://server/file.en.html when english language is chosen or http://server/file.mk.html when Macedonian is chosen. This was UP-1433. Other applications use the form http://server/page/en  and http://server/page/mk and this can be made as a configurable option of all webproxy portlets, that if the user configures a link in the form: - http://server/pageNamePrefix[LANG]pageNameSuffix     [LANG] would be automatically changed to the active locale language. If the link does not exist, the content could be retrieved from the URL with [LANG] deleted as a default URL for languages that do not exist, as a default. I guess no-one had enough time to review the proposed changes and check the validity, but I will reiterrate that we are live in uPortal 2.6 like this for 4 years. The cache is disabled but for us it is not a problem because we rarely have more than 100 concurrent visitors. So I ask the question - are these propositions interesting enough to be even considered to be included in current TRUNK and the patches reviewed by some committer who know more about the inner workings and solve the problem with the cache? Do I clone the issues for UP3, reactivate the same ones or should I just drop this subject :) ? Thanks -- You are currently subscribed to uportal-dev@lists.ja-sig.org as: arch...@mail-archive.com To unsubscribe, change settings or access archives, see http://www.ja-sig.org/wiki/display/JSG/uportal-dev