Multilanguage - purpose and meaning of backend lang flags

[adamderesz]

Hi,

Can anyone, please, explain me the meaning and purpose of language flags/fields that were recently added to category and article edition pages?

Most of my clients ask for multilingual content, and I have always made it 'standard' way - produce separate structure for each languaga available... plus add a static or dynamic (nav_list) menu to switch between all of them...

If that solution with flags and references is going to improve or do something automagically - I would LOVE to know that and how to use these special features. Yet could not find anything about it within forum nor project news... or I'm gone missing something big time :/

I have now a just-about-to-be-launched site with references made from 'additional language' to 'root language', yet it does not seam to give me any special force or abilities - nada.

Please help, share your knowledge with us.
cheers, Adam

[ShyGuy]

I'm also more then interested in,seeing Adams question being answered !

[nameless1]

welcome!

this is work in progress. the idea behind the flags is to control your multi-language website by this. but actually is not ready, yet. so the only productiv thing to use the flags for is for optical tagging the language of your contentparts easily. use lang-switch solution provided by og until this feature is ready.

cheers.

nml1

[adamderesz]

the idea behind the flags is to control your multi-language website by this.

So I understand it is to provide page to page content language switching? Might be interesting, although in my opinion the best way is to keep all language versions separate. I found out my clients often have VERY different content for various regions / languages as they do not re-produce all of content in every language available on theirs site...

yet, the idea is good, I think.. sounds like a good one at least

more problematic at the moment is actually the use of l18n translations in most common content-part templates... ie on article list say for example "read on" element trnslation... it's hard for customer for later on controlling different templates for each language version so I mainly use our very swift l18n translations and it works fine...
yet while it's using the browser language to guess what phrase to show, it becomes tricky when the browser language and browsed language don't match... perhaps you can advice us some trick or workaround for such, so for when we choose one of site language versions it will set up a cookie or something within session and serve the content-oriented-phrases instead of browser-language-triggered

just sharing my small concerns I have from time to time

[update]

there is a script in template/inc_script/frontend_init/disabled for a language switch per domain, but it will work too with one domain only too.
Have a look

[nameless1]

use this. script tip from claus is not what i've spoken about.

[adamderesz]

oh, that's interesting actually... I know this solution/script, yet never used it...
now I think one can actually use only part of it to set the DOCTYPE_LANG to desired value according to current node
and THAT would solve the browser vs chosen/viewed language l18n mismatch.

...I guess