Multilingual Plugin šŸŒ

Plugin
22

Thanks for the interest and feedback everyone.

As a general note please make sure you read the documentation for this plugin before you use it. Many questions are covered there. If you find a subject not covered there, let me know and Iā€™ll add it.

You will also see a feature of this plugin in action when you visit the docs (if youā€™re a guest). The language switcher:

Screenshot at May 08 14-14-41
Screenshot at May 08 14-14-411258Ɨ770 116 KB

@eax Thanks for your feedback

Yes, as you deduced, this is the intention behind the content languages feature. I would recommend you leave it off in production for now (i.e. leave the site setting off), and test it in a contained environment first while youā€™re familiarising yourself with it.

Note that:

  • You can turn it on and off with the multilingual content languages enabled site setting
  • The content language filtering will only be applied if a user has selected a content language in their user settings.

Please read the full documentation on Content Languages here: Pavilion

You can bulk-apply language tags via a server side operation like those described here. I would recommend you get help with that if youā€™re not comfortable with the command line and/or rails. The content languages feature is still in its early stages, so this is the primary way to set up an existing site to work with this feature, particularly a large site.

You can try the language detection feature of the Translator Plugin, paired with the multilingual translator content tag sync feature in this plugin to automatically apply language tags. Note that language detection via translator services are not free. Also this approach is experimental at this stage, particularly on large sites.

I just tested the Translator Plugin + Content Language sync approach on try.thepavilion.io, which has only 77 posts currently. This is how I did it.

  1. Setup the Translator Plugin and this plugin, and turn on all the relevant settings for the sync to work. See further here: Pavilion

  2. Run a rebake operation on the server to trigger language detection on all existing posts. See further here: Rebake all posts? - #2 by zogstrip.

  3. A portion of posts were automatically given a language tag.

This didnā€™t work for all topics and it didnā€™t work perfectly. It didnā€™t work on some topics with existing tags and it didnā€™t get it right in all cases. For example it thought this post was Russian: https://try.thepavilion.io/t/well-have-a-whale-of-a-time/59

Screen Shot 2020-05-08 at 2.51.46 PM
Screen Shot 2020-05-08 at 2.51.46 PM790Ɨ388 34.3 KB

The bigger issue was that a number of topics didnā€™t get a tag. This is an issue with the interplay between the bulk operations of the Translator plugin and the bulk operations of this plugin. Iā€™ll try to refine this method of tagging existing posts with a content language in the next month or so to make this more feasible to adopt on existing sites without any technical help. Iā€™ll also add a section of the docs on the subject once Iā€™ve made some progress.

@Ed_Bobkov As @davidkingham helpfully mentions, Pavilion will only be updating our plugins to work with the very latest Discourse in the first week of every month.

However, to help out, Iā€™ve made the change necessary for this plugin to work with the very latest Discourse. You can see it in action now on the latest Discourse at https://try.thepavilion.io

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