Description

This plugin is intended to make the writing of "multilingual blocs" of a website (such as titles, descriptions and texts) easier.

In the case of a multilingual site with a single tree structure, the use of the tags <multi> is necessary to translate section titles, site title, section texts, etc. in different languages. Article translations can then be published, using SPIP’s native multilingual features.

With its intuitive use of a tabbed interface — one tab for each language —, this plugin makes it easy to add translations in each textual area of your website by eliminating the need for fastidious tag writing.

Even if you disable this plugin, your website will remain multilingual, as it still uses <multi> tags. The corresponding fields will just display the defautl tag notation instead of the tabs.

This plugin requires the installation of the following plugins as it uses some of their features/code to extend SPIP:

• the typographical bar V2 which provides the entry points (pipelines) required to avoid the overriding of the SPIP core,
• the generalized typographical bar which is used to extend the typographical bar V2.

Credits

License GPLv3

© (2007) Cyrille Kazis - Kazis & Co

Installation

Download the plugin’s zip file from Spip-Zone [1] :

The installation follows as for any plugin.

To work successfully, this plugin also requires the following plugins :
 cfg plugin
 generalized typographical bar plugin
 typographical bar v2 plugin

Warnings :

• with SPIP v1.9.2 and 1.9.2a, tabs can be displayed vertically. This does not hinder the correct operation of the plugin. The problem may be easily corrected by modifying the following file dist/style_prive.html [2].
• quotes symbols in titles are temporarily converted to apostrophes by the plugin, because the presence of quotes generates problems when displaying filling fields.
• SPIP natively cuts long texts in articles into sub texts. This functionality has been disabled. [3]
• with the future 1.9.3, multilingual configuration of the site data ("your site’s name" and "site description" fields) doesn’t work.
• pages with many fields, such as an article editing page, may take a long time to execute (and generate script execution time-outs through the browser). The best approach is to disable typographical bars on titles and descriptions and not to activate languages tabs on secondary fields, such as : subtitle, brief description., etc. The number of languages is also an important factor. With more than 3 languages, it is better to manage the multilingualism on articles using SPIP’s native translation functionalities.

Configuration

To configure the generalized typographical bar plugin : enable all areas for which you wish to activate multilingualism. For more detail : see the corresponding article.

To configure the multilingual extension plugin : you must use the plugins administration page. Follow the link "Access to the configuration panel with cfg".

From the configuration panel, you can then :

• select language tabs for display (separate each international code by comas). You will find a list of codes in the private area : "configuration"->"language management"->"multilingual"
• choose not to display typographical short-cuts for the titles (as has been done on the example above). This option is useful if you don’t need typographical short-cuts in titles but have the typographical bar enabled for the titles in order to activate the multilingual extension.
• enable or disable multilingualism on articles and on news items. You can, for example, disable multilingualism on an article if you want to use SPIP’s native solution for articles translation, allowing you to have a different number of articles, depending on the language chosen.

Plugin coded by Arnault PACHOT.
Contribution translated from French to English by Catherine PITIOT
Correction work by Etienne B. aka Loiseau2nuit, Mortimer and Brian WALKER (on mailing list ’spip-en’) .