ikiwiki/doc/plugins/contrib/linguas.mdwn

[[template id=plugin name=linguas author="Jordà Polo"]]
[[meta title="linguas (third-party plugin)"]]

Linguas
=======

Linguas is a plugin for [ikiwiki](http://ikiwiki.kitenet.net/) that
allows translations of wiki pages.

Download: [linguas.pm](http://wiki.ettin.org/files/linguas.pm) (2006-08-21).

Usage
-----

Translatable pages and translations must have the following format:
`pagename.$LANG`, where `$LANG` is a ISO639-1 (two-letter) language code.
To enable linguas, add the following line in the source code of the page:

	\[[linguas ]]

Note that linguas is only required in one of the pages (the original,
for instance); the rest of translations will be automatically
updated. Additionally, it is also possible to specify the title of
the translation:

	\[[linguas title="Translated title"]]


Template
--------

This is the template code that should be added to `templates/page.tmpl`:

	<TMPL_IF NAME="LINGUAS">
	<div id="linguas">
	<p class="otherlinguas"><TMPL_VAR NAME="OTHERLINGUAS"></p>
	<ul>
	<TMPL_LOOP NAME="LINGUAS">
	<li><TMPL_VAR NAME=LINK></li>
	</TMPL_LOOP>
	</ul>
	</div>
	</TMPL_IF>


TODO/Known Problems
-------------------

* The current language list only contains 4 languages (ca, de, en,
es), and is "hardcoded" in linguas.pm. Would be interesting to define
it in ikiwiki.setup, though some problems were found while trying to do
so. (Actually, defining hash-like arguments from the command like works
fine, but it fails from ikiwiki.setup.)

  > My guess about this is that it's because of the way Setup/Standard.pm
  > untaints the config items from the file. It has code to handle arrays,
  > but not hashes or more complex data structures. --[[Joey]]

  >  > Right. With this simple
  >  > [patch](http://wiki.ettin.org/files/hash_setup.patch) it seems to
  >  > work. However, note that 1) it only allows simple hashes, hashes of
  >  > hashes will not work (I don't think getops can handle complex hashes
  >  > anyway); 2) I don't really know when/why you call
  >  > `possibly_foolish_untaint()`; and 3) I'm no perl guru ;). --Jordà

  >  >  > It's good. Applied..

* Wiki links to other translated pages require the full page name
including the `.$LANG`. It should be possible to link automatically
to pages with the same `.$LANG`, but that would probably require some
changes in IkiWiki. (I'm not sure though, I still haven't looked at
it... any hints?)

  > Have you considered using the form ll/page? This would let more usual
  > linking rules  apply amoung pages without needing to specify the
  > language. I'm not sure if you're supporting browser content
  > negotiation, or whether that other layout would be harder to support it
  > though. --[[Joey]]

  >  > Actually, I'm happy with the way it works now (and yeah, it is very
  >  > easy to take advantage of content negotiation). I just wanted
  >  > something simple to translatte a single page (or a few pages), not
  >  > the entire wiki. I'm not even sure it is a good idea to have fully
  >  > multilingual wikis, in most cases I would go for a different wiki
  >  > for each language. That said, I think it is an interesting idea, so
  >  > I'll take a look when I have the time. Thanks for your comments.
  >  > --Jordà

Examples
--------

* [Linguas](http://wiki.ettin.org/linguas.en.html). A page with the same
content than this one.

* [Hello in some languages](http://wiki.ettin.org/hello/hello.en.html). The
translations were taken from [Hello in many
languages](http://www.omniglot.com/language/phrases/hello.htm) and from
the [Debian](http://www.debian.org/) website.