But the Localization Manager is a little different. It allows you - as the name suggests - to localize, or translate, the user interface into different languages, allowing users to view the site in the language of their choice (if you support more than one).
But the other interesting thing it allows you to do is change the verbiage in the default (US English) interface to account for UK spelling, change terminology like replacing the word "discussions" everywhere with "topics," and reword instructions as you see fit. It's very powerful, and requires no scripting!
As you can see, there are 4 basic parts to the Localization Manager. We'll start with the site charset.
What this does is place a meta tag with the charset in the <HEAD> of your document. You may want to choose ISO-8859-1 for most Latin character sets, or UTF-8 if you are supporting non-Latin languages.
The next control down in the menu is where you add and remove languages, and define what the default language is for users who have not yet made a choice in their preferences.
User preferences:
You can see here that we have added Pig Latin as a supported language, but left English as the default. It's important to note that this doesn't actually provide a translation, but just adds support for that language to your site so you can begin the process. If you are just using US English and only want to change some of the wording, you don't have to visit this page at all.
To provide the translations (or reword the text in English as you see fit), you can use either of the last two options: Edit language strings using web forms or Edit language strings using spreadsheets.
The first option brings up a page like this, where you select the language to edit or translate, and select the plugin whose resource strings you want to edit or translate.
You can either search for a specific string, like "discussions" in our example above, or view them all.
Once you've made the changes you need to make, you can save your changes.
If you have a large number of strings to edit or translate, it may be more convenient to use the Spreadsheet option. What this does is produce a spreadsheet for you to pass off to your translation team. When they've done their work, the finished spreadsheet is run through this page again to apply the translations.
The final option, not in the Localization Manager menu, is to use scripting to create and edit your custom strings file. If you are not afraid of JavaScript, this is perhaps the fastest option. Just put in the strings you need to change, though, or you will not be able to take advantages of future updates.
It's worth noting that the translation machinery will first attempt to deliver a given resource string in the language of the user's choice. If that is missing (due to an error, or an incomplete translation project), it will use the string for the "fallback" language - usually US English, but that can be changed by scripting if necessary.
As you can see, the WCMS Localization Manager is quite flexible, and entirely possible to use without any scripting! Next time we'll talk about some developer tools included with the WCMS.
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