Internationalisation

Multilingual URLs

If you use more than one language, django CMS urls, including the admin URLS, need to be referenced via i18n_patterns(). For more information about this see the official Django documentation on the subject.

Here’s an example of urls.py:

from django.conf import settings
from django.conf.urls import include, url
from django.contrib import admin
from django.conf.urls.i18n import i18n_patterns
from django.contrib.staticfiles.urls import staticfiles_urlpatterns
admin.autodiscover()
urlpatterns = [
    url(r'^jsi18n/(?P<packages>\S+?)/$', 'django.views.i18n.javascript_catalog'),
]
urlpatterns += staticfiles_urlpatterns()
# note the django CMS URLs included via i18n_patterns
urlpatterns += i18n_patterns('',
    url(r'^admin/', include(admin.site.urls)),
    url(r'^', include('cms.urls')),
)

Language Cookie

If a user comes back to a previously visited page, the language will be same since his last visit.

By default if someone visits a page at http://www.mysite.fr/ django determines the language as follow:

• language in URL
• language in session
• language in cookie
• language in from browser
• LANGUAGE_CODE from settings

More in-depth documentation about this is available at https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/dev/topics/i18n/translation/#how-django-discovers-language-preference

When visiting a page that is only English and French with a German browser, the language from LANGUAGE_CODE will be used. If this is English, but the visitor only speaks French, the visitor will have to switch the language. Visiting the same page now again after some time, will show it in English again, because the browser session which was used to store the language selection doesn’t exist any more. To prevent this issue, a middleware exists which stores the language selection in a cookie. Add the following middleware to MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES:

cms.middleware.language.LanguageCookieMiddleware

Language Chooser

The language_chooser template tag will display a language chooser for the current page. You can modify the template in menu/language_chooser.html or provide your own template if necessary.

Example:

{% load menu_tags %}
{% language_chooser "myapp/language_chooser.html" %}

If you are in an apphook and have a detail view of an object you can set an object to the toolbar in your view. The cms will call get_absolute_url in the corresponding language for the language chooser:

Example:

class AnswerView(DetailView):
    def get(self, *args, **kwargs):
        self.object = self.get_object()
        if hasattr(self.request, 'toolbar'):
            self.request.toolbar.set_object(self.object)
        response = super(AnswerView, self).get(*args, **kwargs)
        return response

With this you can more easily control what url will be returned on the language chooser.

Note

If you have a multilingual objects be sure that you return the right url if you don’t have a translation for this language in get_absolute_url

page_language_url

This template tag returns the URL of the current page in another language.

Example:

{% page_language_url "de" %}

hide_untranslated

If you add a default directive to your CMS_LANGUAGES with a hide_untranslated to False all pages will be displayed in all languages even if they are not translated yet.

If hide_untranslated is True in your CMS_LANGUAGES and you are on a page that doesn’t yet have an English translation and you view the German version then the language chooser will redirect to /. The same goes for urls that are not handled by the cms and display a language chooser.

Automated slug generation Unicode characters

If your site has languages which use non-ASCII character sets, you might want to enable CMS_UNIHANDECODE_HOST and CMS_UNIHANDECODE_VERSION to get automated slugs for those languages too.