[Dbix-class] Advices needed on creating multilingual application

[mbit at ukr.net]

Mark Lawrence(nomad at null.net)@Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 04:07:41PM +0200:
> On Wed Sep 19, 2007 at 04:16:32PM +0300, mbit at ukr.net wrote:
> > mbit at ukr.net(mbit at ukr.net)@Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 02:49:43PM +0300:
> > > Mark Lawrence(nomad at null.net)@Wed, Sep 19, 2007 at 12:58:24PM +0200:
> > > > On Wed Sep 19, 2007 at 11:50:26AM +0300, mbit at ukr.net wrote:
> > 
> > > > The application might be 'easy', but the type of problem is not, otherwise
> > > > I expect we would have seen the major blogging/CMS platforms do this long
> > > > ago. Unfortunately I think the only ones who have made reasonable
> > > > progress are Plone and the Gengo plugin for wordpress.
> > 
> > Well, i did some research. For now i can say that in gengo (the code is awfull
> > though =/, maybe because of php) they have a little different approach.
> 
> I didn't say they were *good* examples ;-) In fact I haven't looked at
> their code at all, I just know both those groups have made progress.
> 
> > What do you think about that? Actually it is almost as adding a new
> > post in different languages and then gluing translations together.
> > So there is no such a thing like `not translatable fields', this way
> > you have to type all the stuff again.
> 
> That sounds less than ideal. I think the non-translatable data should
> be unique.
> 
> I expect Gengo is like this because it is a plugin, and is constrained by
> the fact that there are other plugins (and/or the core code) that expect
> the schema to be a certain way. And here lies the lesson for anyone
> implementing any kind of multingual application, or who *might* want to
> make their application multilingual in the future:
> 
>     "Plan for multilingual from day one"
> 
> It is almost impossible (or shall we say it requires an extreme amount
> of effort) to convert a monolingual application to multi. There are just
> too many assumptions built into code based on the data structure.
> 
> The strongest pressure from users is usually for other features.
> Consequently multilingual support is continually put on the back-burner,
> which means that even more code gets written under the mono-lingual
> assumption and ironically the problem gets harder making it even less
> likely to be worked on. Hence the reason why huge communities like
> Drupal[1] or Wikipedia still have no good solution.
> 
> Cheers,
> Mark.

Yeah. I agree with you in everything ;-) I'll try to improve my application 
using your recommendations. Though i'll do more research and post results here,
if you don't mind, maybe in a couple of days :)

The thing is that i wrote blog/photoalbum/wiki for my university classmates
using DBIx::Class & Catalyst just in a one week, doing all the work including
templating and design, of course that is a mono-lingual application. But my old
multilingual project is so heavy and it takes a lot of time and effort. That's
why i decided to think more before rewriting that thing over and over again...

Thanx for your paricipating :)

-- 
vti -- Viacheslav Tikhanovskii