Drupal Multi-language: Simple strings not translated - drupal

I'm adding additional languages to a Drupal site that I'm building.
Getting the translation of content working is fairly easy using the Internationalisation module.
Yet, simple things such as date strings, i.e. day, month and year aren't translated.
I would expect simple things like this to be some of the first things to be translated.
Am I missing something?

For text to be translated, each module needs to pass display text through a specific function (named 't()') which allows the text to be translatable.
It's likely that some module writers are better at doing this consistently than others.

I found the solution to this in the end.
It came down to knowing what to search for in the translate interface admin section.
I was looking to translate month names into different languages and so search for strings matching 'November'. This always came up with nothing.
It truned out that I need to search for 'month'. This then allowed my to add translations for all of the month names and also other date related translations.
Very frustrating the effort required to find that out!

Related

Drupal List View for data entry to multiple records

I would like to create a data entry form in Drupal 7 that is similar to Filemaker's List View. List View is a view that contains many records on a page. When Submit button is clicked, data entered in the fields will be assigned to the individual records.
For example, I have a list of students' names and a column field of grade type. The student's name will be created from Drupal View's filtering, but the grade field will be empty waiting for me to key in.
What is the proper Drupal's module that can enable this functionality? Or what can I do to create this functionality.
This approach is closer to your original request, im testing this out now and I think it should more than do the trick, much more interestingly too.
http://drupal.org/project/slickgrid
Edit:
I highly recommend trying this its awesome!!
A couple quick tips
Be sure to also install http://drupal.org/project/title so you can reset the title (make it a field), Basically with this editor you can only edit actual fields, so same goes for location module, you'll need to use the field option rather than node option.
One possible downer, at least for my site, it appears the drupal module does not support jquery 1.7 which my site uses, so a few buttons etc don't work as expected, also the drupal module does not support the latest slickgrid release either. I'd like to look into fixing that but I dont have the time just yet, possibly someone will before long. If jquery 1.7 is not required for your site then none of that will be a problem for you.
I just figured how to do something similar, although I went about it a different way then I think would be the most desirable, at any rate what I did works perfectly for me at the moment.
What I did...
Used a google docs spreadsheet for data entry, exported a CSV file, then used Feeds module to Import and Map it to my desired content type. I was even able to get location, taxonomy & image fields to map.
Modules & Stuff Used...
Feeds http://drupal.org/project/feeds which also includes Feeds
Importer, you'll want to read through all the instructions to be sure
you understand the import methodology, I could never explain it all
here!
Feeds Tamper http://drupal.org/project/feeds_tamper , I used this to
explode the cell which had a | separated | list of taxonomy terms (dont use comma), the
nice side effect is if the term doesn't exist it creates it for you!
Spreadsheet - Personally I created a Google Docs Spreadsheet, any type
will do. This spreadsheet has every field you want to map to fields
in your content type.
"More Better"
Currently I am on the hunt for a simple backend UI way to do this, but this is what I've settled on for now. I just couldn't imagine hand entering hundreds of nodes, page submit after page submit! I will post back if I figure another way to do it. Good luck!
I have just started with
https://www.drupal.org/project/editableviews
which enables the creation of views where all the fields are editable, including when no data exists in the related entity. At the first url is also documentation.
There a screencast which shows more
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_D4z4Bw6iw

Drupal - change name of uploaded images to random alphanumeric long string

I've noticed that it is a common functionality within public sites to change the name of uploaded pictures to a long, 'random', alphanumeric string. This is good for privacy etc.
I can't find a module within Drupal that achieves this, and was wondering if it was possible. This would need to operate before modules like ImageCache.
???
I think there're no modules that does exactly what you're looking for, but i can suggest a way to achieve this using code. There's a module called filefield_paths which makes you able to change the name of imagefield files with a token, provided by the token module.
Looking into the code of this module you can see how it works and make your own small module to achieve the same result with an alphanumeric string.
In detail, the function you're looking for is here, at line 457.
I can't provide a directly working solution as I need time to write and test the code, however this is a very good starting point.

Drupal 7: How can I create a key/value field(or field group, if that's even possible)?

Let's say I'm creating some app documentation. In creating a content type for functions, I have a text field for name, a box for a general description, and a couple other basic things. Now I need something for storing arguments to the function. Ideally, I'd like to input these as key-value pairs, or just two related fields, which can then be repeated as many times as needed for the given function. But I can't find any way to accomplish this.
The closest I've gotten is an abandonded field multigroup module that says to wait for CCK3, which hasn't even produced an alpha yet as far as I can tell and whose project page makes no obvious mention of this multi-group functionality. I also checked the CCK issue queue and don't think I saw it in there, either.
Is there a current viable way of doing this I'm not seeing? Viable includes "you're thinking of this the wrong way and do X instead." I've considered using a "Long text and summary" field, but that smells hackish and I don't know if I'd be setting myself up for side-effects. I'm new to Drupal.
There is the http://drupal.org/project/field_collection module but it's not yet ready. Right now you would need to implement your entity alas to do this :( not easy.
Not sure how well it would work, because it currently does a bit more (eg, forces to group pairs into categories and the keys need to be predefined) but you might want to have a look at http://drupal.org/project/properties.
You could create a these key-value fields on their own: create 2 regular fields that that can be added as often as needed.
So you have a x fields for the keys and x for the values. If this is only for you or other people it might work OK but usability wise, it's very ugly.
If you need to extract the fields from the function, to display it properly in a page template, you should propably use a different approach. Write the function with its arguemnts in a CCK field and in the template extract them as needed. The arguments are always (depending on language) in () and the different arguments are seperated by , so splitting them would by pretty easy.

Interpreting Search Results

I am tasked with writing a program that, given a search term and the HTML source of a page representing search results of some unknown search engine (it can really be anything, a blog, a shop, Google, eBay, ...), needs to build a data structure of the results containing "what's in the results": a title for earch result, the "details" link, the position within the results etc. It is not known whether the results page contains any of the data at all, and whether there are any search results. The goal is to feed the data structure into another program that extracts meaning.
What I am looking for is not BeautifulSoup or a RegExp but rather some clever ideas or algorithms on how to interpret the HTML source. What do I do to find out what part of the page constitutes a single result item? How do I filter the markup noise to extract the important bits? What would you do? Pointers to fields of research covering what I try to to are aly greatly appreciated.
Thanks, Simon
I doubt that there exist a silver-bullet algorithm that without any training will just work on any arbitrary search query output.
However, this task can be solved and is actually solved in many applications, but with different approach. First you have to define general structure of single search result item based on what you actually going to do with it (it could be name, date, link, description snippet, etc.), and then write number of html parsers that will extract necessary necessary fields from search result output of particular web sites.
I know it is not super sexy solution, but it probably the only one that works. And it is not rocket science. Writing parsers is actually extremly simple, you can make dozen per day. If you will look into html source of search result, you will notice that output results are typically very structured and marked with specific div sections or class atributes, so it is very easy to find it in the document. You dont have even use any complicated HTML parsing library for that, something grep-like will be enough.
For example, on this particular page your question starts with <div class="post-text"> and ends with </div>. Everything in between is actually a post text with some HTML formatting that you may want to remove along with extra spaces and "\n". And this <div class="post-text"> appears on the page only once.
Once you go at large scale with your retrieval applicaiton, you will find out that there is not that big variety of different search engines on different sites, and you will be able to re-use already created parsers for sties using similar search engines.
The only thing you have to remember is built-in self-testing. Sites tend to upgrade and change design from time to time. If your application is going to live for some time, you will need to include into your parsers some logic that will check validity of their results and notify you every time search output has changed and is not compatible anymore with your parser. Then you will have to modify particular parser or write new one.
Hope this helps.

Translating external api results in Drupal

We're building a multi-language Drupal stack and one of the concerns we have is that our payment processor is going to have to send back some information to us. We've been able to narrow this down so that the strings they're sending back look like
<country code>-<number of months>
so we can easily translate that into any number of languages, except English.
t('FR-12') is all well and good if we want to translate that into a french description, but because there's not an English language a similar string like t('EN-12') is not translatable.
Similarly for the generic string: #API_Connection_Error
This sort of generic string approach seemed really compelling to me at first but it seems to not work in Drupal. Do you have any suggestions about how to translate generic strings like this into both English and other languages?
Thank you, I've been looking through Google all morning.
I see two ways to achieve this at the moment:
You could just replace the default English language definition with a custom version. That way, you can 'translate' selected English strings just as with any other language. If you have configured locale module to fallback to the original string in case of absent translations, you can just add your special cases as translations to your custom English version, and everything else will use the original English version.
Take a look at the String Overrides module - it allows you to define custom overrides for any string that gets passed through t(), with separate overrides per language, including the original English.
I'd use the second option in your case, except if the number of 'external' strings is very high. See the first if clause of the t() function for the mechanism used for the overrides (lookup in language specific Drupal variable arrays).
Note that the String Overrides module just adds admin UI pages to configure those Drupal variables in the Backend - you could add/adjust them yourself as well (e.g. from a custom module).

Resources