Forum OpenACS Q&A: Re: How to customize the login process

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Posted by Joel Aufrecht on
One basic approach is that you do primary translation work on the public translation server, translate.openacs.org.  This work can be overseen by professional translators, both paid and volunteer, and by the community at large.  The work on the translation server is converted to "catalog files," which are XML files that are included with every package and loaded into the database on installation (for English) or when a locale is enabled (for everything else).

So step 1 is do the translations.  Step 2 is that the consensus translations get into the OpenACS CVS tree - this process is awaiting some final code fixes and an upgrade to the translation server to make it easy and automatable.  Step 3 is that new OpenACS releases provide the new translations.

Step 3a is a mechanism for existing sites to easily get new translations - this step hasn't been fully addressed that I'm aware of, because it's actually pretty complicated.  The first part is to get the new files - you can do this via CVS, which is not hard but not automatic either, and could be tedious if you have a lot of locales in a lot of packages.  The second part is to get the new locale data from catalog files into your system.  You can simply re-import the files (import is part of what's done automatically when you Enable an locale).  This will overwrite any existing translations on your site.  If you have none, great, you're done.

But if you have customized your own translations, then you have essentially the same problem as if you have customized some of the standard code - you have to do a merge when you get new translations or new code.  Fortunately, acs-lang in 5.0.0 includes a merge mechanism for this.

So the bottom line is, if you have time to wait 1-2 months while this process is ironed out, do the work on the translation server and then import it back to your server with the next dot release.  If not, do it on your server and we'll figure out how to get it to the translation server.