Forums depending on users language

[naim]

First of all, add a Language attribute to forums (default "en").

When a user is surfing a site/forum, it is best to allow them see content in there own language,
So if a forum has multiple languages installed, let phpBB determine which forums to display (depending on language).

this includes adding a language switch for guests.

[naderman]

Moved this to discussion, because it is not detailed enough for an RFC on configuration, standard behaviour implementation ideas, etc.

There will certainly still need to be a way to access forums in other languages. Personally I think this would be better fit for a MOD.

[naim]

Sorry for not giving a bit more details,
What i propose is to do is:

1. Add a "Language Selector" to all pages (a combo box, or a list of languages).
2. When $_REQUEST['lang'] is set to an existing Language ISO, display the page in that language.
3. Add a new column to the phpbb_forums table named lang, type int(2) unsigned. That will contain the lang_id (from phpbb_lang) of the forum.
4. When Creating a new forum/category/link, add a combo-box with the installed languages.
5. Display forums only in pages with the same lang_id.

[MartinTruckenbrodt]

Hello,
+1 !!! Would be a very nice feature.

But IMO first browser language detection should be added. Then your requested feature can be really very usefull. It think there is a validated Olympus MOD doing if for guests. There are not a lot of code changes needed.
BTW: Don't forget to change anonymous langauge automatically too then your are changing board default language in future automatically. IMO the Olympus default behaviour makes no sense.

Bye Martin

[imkingdavid]

I'm not sure I like this... more complex really than it's worth. If you want different forums based on different languages, why not make different boards?

[MartinTruckenbrodt]

Hello imkingdavid,
in past (several years ago) I've been running two board for the same things - one german and one engilsh. And I have used one set user tables. It was quite easy with using only different table prefixes and one database.
I think this is the most important point: Users have no need to register double!.

But I decided to merge the boards into one board ( http://www.pipidae.org/cgi/phpBB3/index.php ) then I was upgrading from phpBB2 to phpBB3. It's just for usability for users (e.g. most of (younger) germans are speaking english too) and less of work for me as the webmaster.

Please excuse my bad English!

Bye Martin

[naim]

I'm not sure I like this... more complex really than it's worth. If you want different forums based on different languages, why not make different boards?

The idea is to display all forums on the index page, sorted by language (or whatever the board admin chooses). When a user selects a forum, the Language is forces to the forum-specific language.
Example:
You have a forum with three languages: A, B, C. and x amount of forums, every forum has its own language.
if a user selects a forum with language A, the display of the forum will be forced to the forum's language (the layout increases support for rtl languages: Hebrew, Arabic).
and then if a user selects a forum with language B, the forum display language will be forced to be language B.

forum display language The system language. buttons, texts, etc..

Q: Why not make different boards? A: Its a pain for the user & moderator to keep on switching boards, especially when the board has more than 2 languages.
I am currently setting up a forum for an organization that requires English, Arabic, Hebrew. Its really a pain to keep on switching boards when most of the users know all three languages.

[DavidIQ]

I'm not sure I understand the point. Changing the language won't change the content (posts and forum descriptions) and if a board is multi-lingual the user would have set their spoken language in their preferences anyways. I don't see any benefit whatsoever in having specific areas of the forum change the language of the displayed labels and images on a per-forum basis. Are you going to override a user's settings when they enter these forums? If so...why?

[imkingdavid]

I'm not sure I understand the point. Changing the language won't change the content (posts and forum descriptions) and if a board is multi-lingual the user would have set their spoken language in their preferences anyways. I don't see any benefit whatsoever in having specific areas of the forum change the language of the displayed labels and images on a per-forum basis. Are you going to override a user's settings when they enter these forums? If so...why?

+1

Q: Why not make different boards? A: Its a pain for the user & moderator to keep on switching boards, especially when the board has more than 2 languages.
I am currently setting up a forum for an organization that requires English, Arabic, Hebrew. Its really a pain to keep on switching boards when most of the users know all three languages.

If most users speak all three languages, why do you need to change the languages? As DavidIQ already said, post content is not translated so the only change would be in the non-dynamic (static) text. And if a user is able to read those labels in one language, they should have no problem remembering what the language is even if he or she cannot read the language itself.

[JoshyPHP]

Actually it's a pretty nice idea, it just needs a good way to be implemented. Take Gentoo's forums, they have a bunch of English-speaking forums at the top, they have a pretty extensive list of international forums in Chinese, Dutch, Finnish, etc... The list is pretty long and most users would probably prefer if most of those forums were stashed away in a subforum rather than on their index page, save for the one forum that speaks their native language.

Now I don't know how it should be done (you certainly can't maintain a different forum tree for each language) but that's an idea worth discussing IMO.

A "lang" field could be added to the forums table, and perhaps there's a way to leverage the lang attribute in HTML. One hackish way would be to hide or show forums using CSS selectors. Obviously this is not a complete solution because it means that some forums could become inaccessible.

Perhaps somebody has links to international forums that you could use as examples? It would be interesting to see how bigger forums handle them.