bilingual forum

Hey,

I have integrate the phorum on a website. I used the embedded module. I find it very nice. A this adres you can view the resultate.

I have 2 questions:
- How is it possible to switch the language of the forum when you are in the french or dutch part of the forum? (I can do it when the user is logged but never for anonymous users)
- Is it possible to dynamically change the order of the subjets depending of the language you use. For the french users: fist the french subjects, after the dutch subjects. For the dutch users: fist the dutch subjects, after the french subjects.


Thanks.
Loïc

P.S. Sorry for my bad english ;-)

I see different parts in your phorum as simply separate forums.
you can set the language for each forum separately.

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Thomas Seifert

No it's a same forum for the 2 languyages.

You probably have good reasons for mixing the two languages in one forum, but the problems that you are trying to solve are easily solved by creating two forums. Then you have control over the forum language and topics are split by language. If you want to mix them in one forum, there are no ready features to use and you will have to do some programming to get things done.

Switching languages for anymous users probably can be done using a cookie to store the language and let the cookie override the default chosen language through a mod that uses the common_post_user hook.

I do not see a good way for implementing sorting the threads by language. Since there are no features to sort the threads by any arbitrairy field of data, you'd have to hack up the database layer to implement your own sorting algorithm. Next to that, you would have to keep track of the language in which each thread is written. So you'd either need a fully automated language recognizer (perl has something called Textcat and I asume there's language recognizers for other languages as well) or let the users fill in the language in which they are writing and store that with the message. You cannot depend on the language setting that the user is using, because Belgium people might write in both languages.

As you can see, there's a lot of specialized things going on, which cannot possibly be handled by an out-of-the-box Phorum install.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce

I have the same problem. I just want the same forum, same messages etc... being displayed with 2-3 different language files.

I'm not worried about the messages and posts in different languages. As long as I can switch the language of the forum interface I'd be very happy.

Any ideas on how to do this?

Tino

Discover the Divine Truth | [www.discoverthedivinetruth.com]



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/16/2006 02:23PM by DonTino.

There are a couple of elegant ways to do this. It just depends on how geeky you want to be about it. You could for example create dirs like english/ french/ etc. and have a common module that checked what dir you were in, set the appropriate language and (this is important) change the http_path in $PHORUM to match what they are viewing.

Or, you could have the user choose their language. The links could take them to an add on script (or an add on module) within Phorum that could set a cookie on the user's system. The module would then override the language based on the user's cookie.

Brian - Cowboy Ninja Coder - Personal Blog - Twitter

Brian like your ideas and I like the first approach best.

I have just one problem. I' a bit new to Phorum and I'm not sure how to set the language for the forum, except in the admin panel. How would I have to go about it to set the language. where is it set in the database? or in some cookies etc..

Thanks again
Tino

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Discover the Divine Truth | [www.discoverthedivinetruth.com]

The languages can be set in the general settings in admin. They also can be set by editting the properties of the individual forums. Registered users can also set their preferred language (which normally will override forum language settings).

Folks: I really wonder about this rather constructed problem. My Dutch customers find it annoying if they have to read Czech stuff in "their" forum. Give your visitors a feeling of being home in their forum. Why should German forum visitors bother about a French forum UI?

Keep in mind that each single user may switch his or her personal language settings in the Control Center. I have set up six language-dependant Phorums in my recent site, see the iCalamus Forums.

Regards, Ulf Dunkel



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 11/22/2006 05:36PM by Ulf Dunkel.

The belgacom.be IP address of the original poster implies that this is about a Belgium website. Belgium has two main languages: French and Dutch. Lots of Belgium people speak both languages. However, they all have a personal favourite, depending on where exactly they are from in the country. My guess is that this is the underlying reason for wanting a bi-lingual forum instead of two separate forums.

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Maurice Makaay
Phorum Development Team
my blog linkedin profile secret sauce