Provide better support for publishing a blog in multiple languages

Summary

At present, Roller does a pretty good job of supporting i18n and blogging in any language, however it does not provide great support for publishing a blog in multiple languages at the same time. This proposal is meant to list the steps to be taken so that Roller can better support publishing blogs in multiple languages.

There has been some discussion about this on the roller-dev list as well as this older page while lists some details about possible approaches ... Proposal_SupportMultiLanguageBloggers

Requirements

• allow weblog authors to publish entries in any language and have Roller track which language an entry is published for.
• update weblog rendering process to be more language aware and allow the browsing user to optionally specify that they want to see content in a single language.

Design overview

tracking locale for weblog entries:

• We already have a "locale" column in the weblog entry table, so we will simply be adding the ability for users to set this column to any locale they choose for each entry. This means that users will now be asked to explicitly set the locale for each entry. The default value for each entry will be the weblog default locale.

backend support:

• some modifications will have to be made in the Roller backend to support queries for entries restricted by locale.

updated rendering process:

• remove the old language servlet and move it's logic into the page servlet (old language servlet urls will be 301 redirected to their new location at the page servlet)

• optionally make a weblog render in only one language at a time. we will add a property to the weblog settings page allowing the weblog owner to specify if they wish to enable multi-language blogging or not. by default this option will be off, which means that a blog homepage and archives will show all entries in all languages. when the multi-language blogging option is on then the weblog homepage and archives pages will show entries from only one language at a time.

• make the page servlet language aware. this means looking for some language indicator in the url and using it to decide what entries to render. if no language is specified then we will use the default locale for the weblog as set in the weblog settings.

... more details coming about tracking language in the url ...