Multilingual drupal website with views - drupal

I'm trying to make a multilingual website in Drupal. My languages that I need are german, dutch, english and french. I've added the i18n module and added the languages.
I work with views to show my content on the website. For the moment I have one page that I want to translate in the 4 languages. I've created a view for each translation. Now I want to link my view to the correct node. Therefore I use a view field in my content node.
PROBLEM:
My problem lies in the url. The first time everything is fine.
my url: localhost/?q=nl/activiteiten
Now when I select english in my language bar the language changes but not the url. my url: localhost/?q=en/activiteiten
Here "activiteiten" must be "activities". How do I solve this?
I've searched a while for this problem on the drupal forums but I can't seem to find a good solution to this problem. The only thing I've found is working with a view field in the content node or with input_views in the body of your node. These two won't work for me.

i18 module with no need to create a view for each
language, you have to translate content using the i18, then
charge between changing the language.
You can have problems from the beginning did not use the module
all languages ​​declared, you have to edit each
content and save it to associate it well.

Well, just reading your own answer I think you've taken a wrong turn somewhere (or you're trying to do something else and I didn't quite catch on).
To create multilingual views for pages (which is what I think you want to do) you would first create a page view (duh), specify what you want to be shown and define a path to it. Then you enable (if it's not enabled already) the URL-alias ("URL-aliassen") module and define aliases for each language (ie. FR : activites - I don't like accents in URLs :p - NL : activiteiten, DE : aktivitaten - if memory serves me right anyway, again with accents removed :p). These aliases will be used as the path from that moment on.
For an article describing this process refer to : Translating Views paths in Drupal.
BTW You could also use the Pathauto module to create these aliases based on the title of your nodes of course instead of defining them manually, you can even (re)create them in batch when you alter the settings.

Eventually I've solved my problem with a view field. I've made my view and in my node I've selected that view in the list. Then in the body you can type something for that language.

Related

Drupal know from where things are showed

I have a strange question but I don't find any hint about that (if it's possible), for a drupal 7 website I have to modify some content of a page in the backoffice, but I really don't know from where some content of this page is created (a table, similar to a view table but not a view table).
I just want to know if there is any way to show which php function the page use to finally be showed. I know there is something like that for the theme (drupal theme debug) but I don't find something for my case.
Any idea ?
You need PHP profiler to check all functions called on page, there's a module for Drupal7 for XHProf integration. But I would suggest you to use your browsers inspector as mentioned by 2pha before. For example if there's a form on the page just use the form ID to find it. Custom classes are very useful in these cases, parts of the html codes etc. In your case search for table headers...
The code you are looking for is most probably in custom modules and the
general suggestion is to keep you custom modules in separated folder from contributed ones.

Drupal I18N - Default language of View elements

I am working on a bilingual site in the latest version of Drupal 6. I installed the Internationalization module and the Views translation module, among many others.
The problem: On /admin/build/translate/search, some elements (e.g. the view title) appear in the text group "Views" and Drupal assumes they are in German, requiring an English translation.
Other elements (e.g. exposed filter labels) appear in the text group "Built-in Interface" and Drupal assumes they are in English, requiring a German translation. But in fact all the strings are in German:
To be clear, I am not seeing an issue with the language selection or the display of the view. The issue is when the page is first parsed by the language system and any translatable strings are inserted into the translation table. Drupal assignes different source languages for elements on the same page. The result is a mix of languages, once these strings are translated.
I thought that maybe it is the language preference of the user who hits the page first that interferes with this, but once I started changing it, I ran into this issue (reading the thread was eye-opening - it should be mandatory reading for anyone considering Drupal for enterprise-class solutions). Ok, now I have the URL prefix in the mix, which means that when a user changes the language preference, the site language does not change until they manually change the URL.
Once I managed to get the page rendered in English, it turned out that Drupal does not pick up the translation strings when the display language equals the source language. So no luck there.
I am ready to code my view in 2 languages, depending on what Drupal thinks the source language is for the various elements, but even that won't work. Has anybody else experienced this?
I think that you probably had basic mistake in how Drupal multilingual system work. I did the same mistake in the first multilingual Drupal site that I've built.
The most important thing to do is - if one of your languages is English - Use English in your code. if you need to put the word 'room' in one of the template use t('room') and not t('zimmer'). Your view titles? use English. Tag names and description? use English. The primary language should be English. After you setup your English site, you can translate your site using translate interface. I know it sound strange to one that his mother tongue is other than English, but I made several multilangual sites with i18n and it is the right way to do it with minimal complications.
Changing the admin interface language only change the interface - not the value. If you change the interface to German (i.e yoursite.com/de/admin/views) it doesn't mean that you are on 'German views'. It is the same view.
There are some exceptions - Multilingual variable as I explained here: How can I set a different homepage per language in Drupal?
I hope that is helpful.

Fundamental understanding of how Views and Pathauto work together

I am having fundamental problems understanding when to use a pathauto rule, and when to use a views page path. I have several custom content types, and I am using blocks to display certain parts of nodes on certain paths. Then I use a views page to display the main node on a path.
When I do this, I can't use pathauto, as it overrides the paths I set in views. Eg.. If I set up a views page path of "location/%", and set a pathauto rule for Location content types of "location/[title-raw]", when I browse to mysite.com/location/mylocation pathauto wins, and simply displays the full node. And if I can't use pathauto, I can't add arguments on my blocks, because Drupal doesn't understand what it's looking at anymore! Arrrg!
I've tried installing Util, and altering the weight of the modules, but that didn't work. But I shouldn't have to do anything crazy like alter module weights, right? There must be some basic flaw in my thinking.
How do you keep your paths and content organized?
Help me flow like water, help me become the cup.
Ok, I've solved my problem. The actual question I should have asked was:
How do you display a single node?
I was basically using Views to style a single node. Of course, this is not what Views is designed for. See others with similar problems:
http://drupal.org/node/400400http://drupal.org/node/316907
My solution:
Let pathauto do all the work.
Add, arrange and style your content as desired at the theme
layer.
In more words: remove views page view, taking the corresponding location/% path with it. Set up your pathauto rules the way you want. Copy node.tpl.php to your theme directory. Duplicate that file and rename it node-[type].tpl.php. Alter node-[type].tpl.php instead of setting up rules in Views.
For more help theming a specific CCK content type see:
http://drupal.org/node/266817
Don't forget!
When using phptemplate node-[type].tpl.php suggestions, there must also be an original node.tpl.php template present in your theme directory or the template suggestion is ignored.
Hope that helps someone else!
Right. The % is a views argument, views superceeds URL aliasing every time. Drupal expects anything after location/ to be the passed in value you are looking for which is why it doesn't understand, or you aren't getting the result you want.
Why are you using views though to control a node view? If you are adding blocks to a view, you should be able to assemble the data in views, and use the Block admin to set the path it displays on (location*).
In general is a good practice to theme the node page and do not let views generate additional urls. It can lead to several problems, as many modules link to the standard node page. Use views to generate listings that links to the node page.
You can also theme a node page without coding, using context or display suite modules.
Just let pathauto do the work, a good idea is to generate the alias based on the menu hierarchy, to have a consistent url scheme. Check out this question: Drupal 7:Pathauto patterns from menu structure hierarchy

Possible pitfalls on a multilingual Drupal site?

I'm about to embark on a journey to build a multilingual Drupal site, where I will most likely have to use Views, Panels and Taxonomy pretty heaily. I am a bit worried about the new-node-for-every-language approach, especially using Panels.
So far I've gotten it to work similarly to what I want by not having multilingual support for the Panels content-type, and fetching content that is from Current language and language neutral . This seem to work as expected, but I'm seeing some problems with it. There might be the occasion that I will have to have a language specific Panel (not published in English for example). If I need to have all my Panels multilingual, there seems to be alot of work to place the nodes for every column in every page in every language. I'm thinking I could possibly solve this by fetching the content with some kind of view with arguments, but this will most likely also lead to alot of work.
Is there some proper way of doing what I'm attempting to describe, or do I have alot of seemingly unnecessary work to expect?
I assume you have i18n module (http://drupal.org/project/i18n) and Views module installed. Then you can create a view for each language - one can choose language in "Filter" section of the view definition.
Once you have views, then you can link them to menus or blocks. The problem is you must have a separate version of block or menu for every language, with a proper view associated - Drupal is choosing proper language version itself according to the configuration (typically content type set in a browser). I haven't found any easier way of doing that.
Fortunately preparing multilingual content is not that hard thanks to the "transalte" functionality for nodes after enabling i18n module, so new node for every page is something one can live with.
BTW you are right that the way Drupal is doing i18n is not the best solution one can think of. I am having hard time with it sometimes.
Well there are some serious issues with views over translating taxonomy terms or vocabs names. This could be resolved with some extra modules or / and custom PHP code inside views fields. Usually 70% of modules does not support translation, then you need to patch them to support it. While others does have translation possibility, but it could be two possible ways: uses variables table to hold different translations UI dependent (need to switch to other language to find a string) or uses translation field tables to utilize "translation interface" from admin menu.
So far that's it :)
I wish you luck!

Drupal, Translating menu PATHS

Is it possible to translate a menu path in Drupal using i18n? In other words, basically creating two different links, namely:
www.mysite.com/english -- www.mysite.com/german
In other words, not just altering the paths, but supporting external links for translation.
And if so... how?
I think I don't understand completely - if you enable multiple languages, every link gets a language prefix automatically, like /en, /it etc. You can anyway alter every URL via an URL alias, a seperate one for each language.
you can't translate menu path but you can translate their alias, when you activate path module you can manually set a different path for every defined language.
if you're talking about external urls, based on the language you are viewing in your drupal site - you'd just create a different language specific menu item points to the external site. So when you're viewing your site in spanish, you'd only see the external spanish link, and the english, german, etc counterparts would be hidden

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