Support for multilanguage sites, Internationalization (I18N)

[Draxeiro]

Lately I've had various projects needing multi-language functionality and I'm starting to run into some snags concerning the workings of the i18n plugin.

Please correct me if I am wrong here but right now creation of pages in one of the additional languages is basically linked to the default language. If the page is not there in the default language it will not show in navigation of the additional language. Correct?

Yes, the default language page is always required, e.g. parent and menu order are only defined there. The idea behind the initial version of the plugin was simply

• there are no special language links
  
• if the user's language settings list any other than the default language, check if the page exists in one of these languages and display it, otherwise display the default language.
  

In my opinion your plugin is one that is absolutely 100% essential for Get Simple. Even when not using the multi-language functionality it's the navigation part makes things so much more flexible.

Basically the way this plugin is set up with regards to multi-language sites things are functional and the logic behind it is sound. But at the same time it also does tend to make things more complicated. As it happens more often than not that people will have differences between languages. Which happens especially in combination with your special pages plugin (think of news and differences between products offered to different markets).

And where one way it will work (default language has more pages than the additional language) vice versa it currently will not.

...
However, in every day practise the need is definitely there to be able to create pages exclusively in the non-default language. So in other words for the languages to have separate content.

I hope this is functionality you are willing to add to your plugin. As it would make it just about perfect.

I fear this would mean rewriting most of the plugin - especially the navigation part. I'll look into it, when I have some time.

It would be a marvellous extension in any case, I am happy that you're at least willing to look into it.

Seems somewhat outside of the scope of the plugin, if you have different pages you have a different site, not nearly alternate languages.

I beg to differ. See my examples above, e.g. a news item meant for only that particular audience. Same thing with regular pages, it will happen often enough.

And while yes it may be somewhat out of the scope of the plugin, this plugin IS what gives GS it's much needed functionality for multi-language sites (especially here in Europe, with all the different languages, you will often get requests for multi-language sites).

And at the same time this would also be the most logical plugin to be further extended this way.

To solve things with different sites would seem to be a bit counter-productive from a user-perspective to be quite honest. Also when compared to other CMS scripts.