#230 — Provide a page centric language switcher

by Daniel Germer — last modified Nov 04, 2010 01:12 PM
State Postponed
Version: 3.x
Area User interface
Issue type Feature
Severity Medium
Submitted by Daniel Germer
Submitted on Dec 29, 2009
Responsible
—
Target release: 4.x
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When trying to access information of the selector.pt for untranslated objects it is impossible to tell if there is a translation available or not.

This results in weird behaviour:
When I am in the site and I have content-language fallback enabled, clicking on a language flag throws the user back to the front-page instead of the fallback language.

There is no possibility to indicate that this object is not available in the language.

Steps to reproduce:
Enable 4 languages (en, fr, de, es) in a fresh Plone 3.3.2 portal with LinguaPlone 3.0 installed
enable English as the Default language.

Create an English and a French version of a page

example.com/page-en is the English (canonical) version
example.com/page-fr is the French translation

Visit example.com/page-en in the language selector choose German you are pointed to: "example.com?set_language=de" instead of the english version "example.com/page-en?set_language=de" of page

You wonder why there is no indication for the language not being available. Try to detect the reason for the language flags not being greyed out, all languages appear to have translations or being translated.

The same applies for language-neutral items, when creating an item language-neutral, and moving between languages, the user is always thrown back to the front-page.

Added by Hanno Schlichting on Feb 02, 2010 03:11 PM
Issue state: Unconfirmed → Confirmed
Target release: None → 3.x
The language selector offered by LinguaPlone is a site-wide language selector. It tries to get the user to best match for his language choice and will always allow the user to select all languages. If no translation for the specific content item exists it tries to look up a suitable translation for any of the parent folders ultimately stopping at the site root.

A separate page centric language switcher would be a good addition, but as you mention needs to follow a different logic.
Added by Hanno Schlichting on Jul 29, 2010 01:34 PM
Issue state: Confirmed → Postponed
Target release: 3.x → 4.x
Added by Sven Deichmann on Nov 04, 2010 01:12 PM
Well... actually we are talking about a product for CONTENT translation... so the switcher should be CONTENT CENTRIC not site centric. (As it was in former versions of LinguaPlone.

You really shouldn't change the behaviour of an existing product... fork a new one if you need a different behaviour... but thats a different thing...)

You should at least be able to choose the behaviour. Best would in my opinion be a page like in the past with a link to the next available translation (other language + further up in current language) which you can switch off in the settings so you get the current behaviour.

You can not be sure that the best thing for the user (and hey... this is about the user, right?) is the next thing up in the tree. Maybe he would prefer the english (or otherwise canonical) language version instead of nothing...

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