Macrotone Blogs

Macrotone blogs upon Joomla, our products and other matters.
Font size: +

Making a component truly multilingual (5)

Whilst finishing up our component there were a few matters which we needed to address.

 

Site Map Generation

The first of these related to the generated ‘site map’ which was not displaying correctly. The problem was caused by us omitting to include the ‘new’ alternative language main menu items in our site map generation component (OSMAP/XMAP) which soon resolved the matter. To be more precise the ‘site generator component’ was installed prior to our multilingual work upon the site, so did not ‘automatically’ pick up the menu items it uses in the map generation. Obvious once one looked at it. It did reveal an addition place where we had to add out additional ‘'database query condition to include only the current displayed language (plus those marked all or undefined).   This just required adding to the ‘getCategories’ method, although to be absolutely certain that only the relevant entries were shown, we also added it to the ‘GetEntries’ method as well. This latter is probably not required except where entries are added to the incorrect categories, but acts as an extra check when the entries are generated.

Deletion of Associated Items

This actually applies to both the front end and the back end of the site. We decided to take a deeper look at the code to handle the deletion of any associations when an item is deleted. To be more precise when an item is deleted, the existing association entry for that item should also be deleted from the associations table. As originally written all association records would be removed for the deleted item and hence also for the associated items. However this is not necessary correct when there are three (3) or more associated items, since one really only wished to remove one association record.  For two associated items it is fine, since we also wish to remove the ‘other’ record in the associations table at the same time. .  So to be precise, we should for situations where there are more than 2 associations for an item, only remove the single record in the associations table, but if there are only two item, then we should remove both records from the associations table. This has worked well in all our tests and wonder why some similar code does not exists in the base Joomla components such as com_content etc. On a busy site with items being created and deleted on a regular basis we can see the situation where the database associations table would be much larger than is necessary, since there would be without similar code being present in the components, resulting in a slower response to other queries.

 

How the PHP tests work

One of the things we omitted to mention in our last post was how the actual code checks were working and didn’t explain what the checks were actually ‘checking’. We made use of two specific methods which we expand upon below:

JLanguageMultilang::isEnabled()

This method determines if the language filter plugin is enabled.  It works for both site and administrator on the site.  If the site is supporting multiple languages then true is return else false is returned.  The presence of the language filter plugin is what is determining whether multiple languages are being used upon the site. Note it does not check whether multiple languages are actually installed.  The distinction is subtle but very clear.

JLanguageAssociations::isEnabled ()

This method is used to determine if the language filter Items Associations parameter is enabled.  One can always have a multilingual site and not make use of item associations, which is ‘relating’ items that are ‘effectively’ the same, but only expressed in a different language. An example might be a site located in a country with two different locally spoken languages (i.e. Serbia) and items are translated and presented in both languages to site visitors.

Making use of the two standard Joomla provided methods simplified our coding, however we still had to add our own code to pick up any desired associations for our displays.

 

To be continued…

Issue Tracker: Handling received emailed issue upd...
Making a component truly Multilingual (4)
 
Go To Top

Joomla! Debug Console

Session

Profile Information

Memory Usage

Database Queries