Forum OpenACS Q&A: Internationalization of OpenACS

Posted by Svet Ivantchev on 05/31/00 02:42 PM

I started with the translation of some of the modules of OpenACS to
Spanish. My question is are there something done in this direction.
Any comments about the best way to do it? Do you think that using
tcl's msgcat is good idea?

Any comment is welcome and if there is interest I can contribute my
work to core OpenACS.

2: Response to Internationalization of OpenACS (response to 1)

Posted by Don Baccus on 05/31/00 03:34 PM

There is some primitive support for this in the templating system, so you might look at the templated version of "news", for instance. This allows you to separate the presentation from the queries that build up the pages.

Currently, this is a real weakness in the ACS, only a couple of modules are templated. You might want to dig around the arsDigita site and talk to folks there about the general problem of supporting non-English versions, as I know it is something they're facing as their business grows.

3: Response to Internationalization of OpenACS (response to 1)

Posted by Roberto Mello on 05/31/00 05:22 PM

As Don said, this is a weakness in ACS, but it's being worked on. ACS 4 will have more template-enabled modules. They are using the regular templating module and not Karl's templating module, which is much more powerful I heard.

For the templated modules you just need to create a template under the templates directory and call the template from within the page you're doing your queries and tcl coding. Polls, news, ecommerce are templated.

For the other modules, the only way to do different languages would be a) template-enable them, b) change the embedded HTML code within the tcl pages. Option b is easier but does not scale since when new versions of ACS come out, you'll have to merge your changes, which means you'll have your own version of ACS.