My site is built on Drupal 5, and enable the Localizer module to provide multilingual content
You have another choice: Internationalization (i18n).
On Drupal you always have different choices, turn left or turn right, it’s a problem. Localizer is just my choice after I estimate two modules according my demands.
When I first time set up my site, latest Localizer is v1.10 for Drupal 5, it works fine, especially with the Taxonomy Menu module, this module can automatically transform my tags into the tree menu I need, it’s the main reason I choose Localizer module because i18n does this job terrible.
The only problem for me is the RSS feed, I was confused by how to get the separate RSS feed for each language, when you visit http://{hostname}/rss.xml, you just get the RSS feed of contents in default language.
This article <How does RSS work on a multi-lingual site?> describe how the Localizer provide RSS feed of contents in different languages.
>. Active “Switch by locale parameter” setting of Localizer
>. Access the RSS feed like:
http://{hostname}/rss.xml?locale=en
http://{hostname}/rss.xml?locale=zh-hans
It works in the Web Browsers (Firefox, IE), But it doesn’t work in RSS Reader (Google Reader), FeedBurner neither. I guess it’s because “?” mark in the URL.
So, still only can get contents in default language from RSS feed. I searched a lot, but failed to find a solution.
Recently i found Localizer module is updated to v3, Give a try to see if they resolved the problem? Why not?
The update process it’s easy, all you have to do is follow the Readme.txt file in the package.
This module has changed hugely, how many changes occurred? Read here
After installed this module, go to the setting page, you will find it does change a lot.
‘Switch by locale parameter’ option disappeared, instead of a ‘Language prefix’ option block. I guess that’s what I want, active the ‘Automatically append language prefix to all content (node) pages’ option and save, check the RSS feed again. Now the RSS feed becomes like:
http://{hostname}/en/rss.xml
http://{hostname}/zh-hans/rss.xml
Cool, but wait, Why there are Chinese contents in English RSS feed? Go back to setting page, I found the Option ‘Activate content language fallback support’ in ‘Content settings’ block (previous ‘Support for different contents types’ block) is active.
What’s meaning of ‘language fallback’? You can find the answer in here
That’s not what I want, so I deactivated this option. Now my site contains English and Chinese contents, I want to set English as my BASE language, it means the Chinese reader can read the English content if it doesn’t have counterpart Chinese content, but the English reader only need to access the English contents.(Many Chinese speak English, But how many foreigners can understand Chinese?)
My previous solution is post the English content I want to display in both languages as ‘ANY’ language. Let’s test it again, create a node, Oh….h.
Where is my lovely TinyMCE button? Where is my ‘ANY’ language?
TinyMCE problem is easy, remember the language prefix? Go to the Setting page of TinyMCE, edit the Visibility option in profile, add the language prefix, save, done.
But without ‘ANY’ language, things become troublesome, All of my contents in ‘ANY’ language are still there, but not displayed in any language. The solution is Change it into a specific language.But, to display the content in all languages, I have to create duplicated node in every languages.
This is life, at least it gives me a reason to expect the next release.
