linguist Plugin

Linguist is a Manila plugin that eases the work of editors and translators in multilingual Manila websites. Its most important job is to allow editing of multiple language versions of the same story. It does this by making assumptions about the site structure. Linguist is not a free software, a licence is required.

Suppose the site supports 3 languages English, French and Italian and that some of the stories are exists in all 3 languages. One way to organise them is as categories (url sub-directories) per language, and to make sure that each category contains more or less the same structure underneath. If we opt to use 2-letter Language Codes , then we might start from a site structure that looks like

• Home - multi lingual introduction page
• • en
  • fr
  • it
• another page

Now we agree to the convention that if we add a story to the English part of the site, say at path /en/directory1/story1, then the French version of the story will be at /fr/directory1/story1 and the Italian at /it/directory1/story1. With this convention, if we know one relative path, we can deduce the relative paths of stories in the other languages.

Parallel editing means clicking on one button to get 3 edit in a frame in a frames page.

or, as seperate pages with a form for each story

The green background indicates a new story, the colour is configurable.

As the pictures show, all flavous of editing are supported WYSIWYG, HTML and standard. If you are running plugins that extend the Edit forms, such as Manilafixer or Metadata, they continue to function as before.

No patches to Manila are required to support linguist. The cost of icences for linguist may be obtained from the author David Bayly.

Many thanks to Jermome Camus for intensive beta testing, localisation to French and Italian and for assistance with the documentation.