If you have ever written a thoroughly internationalized project you know just how hard it can be. While Python and Django are fantastic in allowing internationalization in your applications, sometimes we still need a little more help.
In the last post Kevin told showed us django-rosetta and a way to package and deploy the translation files. That is certainly one step. I have been a part of a team responsible for a PHP product with support for at least six languages. It got pretty hairy without a tool like django-rosetta and a sane deployment process.
In the Django world, the community is a huge resource – not just for advice and documentation, but also pluggable applications you can use in your projects. One of these we use pretty frequently is django-faq for creating an easy to update, index, and change FAQ system without a client writing tons of HTML. In case you think you are seeing a theme here, well, you are – we are working on an internationalized project. So we had another opportunity to contribute back to the community by internationalizing the django-faq app with the help of the already awesome multilingual-ng app. All in all a very small tweak for us to do – but now with one more fully internationalized app in the tool belt, it’s easier to internationalize the next project. I hope it helps more than just us!
If you’ve never worked with multilingual-ng in models, I’ll give a quick run-through here with the Topic model (but you can see all the basic changes I made in this diff).
1 2 3 4 | class Topic(models.Model): # normally your name field would go here, but to make it translatable you do this class Translation(TranslationModel): name = models.CharField(max_length=150) |
The rest of the work is magic. And there is an admin class built to handle the display and saving of this as well. It plugs right into the Django ORM. Beautiful!