I've just bought Advanced Articles and am currently evaluating Event Calender. We're planning to use both on an international site in which the user can switch between German and English at any point in time (for the main contents we're using MHTML which allows us to add the content in different languages in the same module). We might add further languages later - but for now it's just these two.
For our use case, there will be articles that appear only in German, other articles that will appear only in English, and some articles which will be published in both languages. In my point of view, the simplest and most efficient solution would be if we could add the language to the articles as a property (e.g. "this is an English article", "this is a German article") and then have the module filter by the current user language. In other words: If the user has selected "English", only articles tagged with "English" would be visible; if the user selected "German", only articles tagged with "German" would be visible. For backwards compatibility and bi-lingual articles (both languages in one text), it would probably make sense to have that "article language property" nullable; and if it's null, the article is always displayed - regardless of the current user language).
Instead of having two languages in one article, we'd probably have the same article twice, with the different languages and tagged with the respective language properties. While it would certainly be nice to be able to have actual multilingual articles (one article with multiple language versions, like how the MHTML module works), I'd assume that would require a rather intense refactoring on your side and I think in the case of articles / news, it's not really necessary. The only thing you'd have to be careful with (as far as I can tell) is when a user changes the language while on the details view of an article. But as long as the details view just goes by article ID and ignores the language (which I feel would be fine), that wouldn't be a problem: Basically, when the user changes the language while in the details view of an article, he'd simply keep the article in that same language and only see the actual effect of the language change when he looks at the articles overview again (where now, instead of the articles in the previous language, only the articles in the new language would be listed).
Btw, this is also the reason why I'd like to avoid having to use two actual modules on two different pages: That way, it would be impossible to switch language while looking at the overview of articles. You'd have to change language and then click on the link to the news page again (which I don't think many people will understand ;-) ). It might be able to apply a JavaScript-hack to auto-jump to the other page (I could use the MHTML module for that) ... but that would be just that: A rather ugly hack ;-)
Would something like that (tagging / filtering articles by language) be possible already, and if not: Would you be willing to implement it? ... and if so: Could you give any approximate timeframe (like "matter of weeks" vs. "matter of months" vs. "matter of years")? |