Today I made an offer to a prospective client for a multi-lingual, Plone based website. Since it's been a while since I've had any hands-on experience with Plone's de-facto standard product for managing multi-lingual content LinguaPlone I decided I'd best take the current offerings for a spin before I make any (legally binding!) promises.

On first sight, things regarding multi-lingual content are currently a bit confusing. While there is a stable release of LinguaPlone that offers support for Plone 3.0, there have also been recent developments in Plone itself that have broken LinguaPlone (for instance 3.0.5 didn't seem to fare particularily well in this regard).

As always, when feeling uncertain or confused about something Plone related, I turned to #plone, where luckily jensens and baekholt were online at the moment and it soon transpired, that things aren't actually quite as bleak as it seemed and further testing on my part today confirmed that. So, without further ado, here's the lodown:

• use Plone >= 3.0.6
• install plone.browserlayer
• use LinguaPlone 2.1/svn
• use PloneLanguageTool >= 2.1
• don't use the default Language selector portlet provided by Plone

The last item requires a bit of explanation. In its current implementation the default language selector portlet only switches the language of the interface, but doesn't actually change the context to the translated version in the selected language. This, obviously still needs to be fixed, but is just cosmetical in nature. And if the offer that I just sent out will be accepted, I might even do it myself ;-)

Other than the non-working language selector all the scenarios I played through today worked like a charm, though. To switch languages I needed to manually enter the URL of an object that I knew to be of the target language, but since the new version of PLT keeps content and language interface always in sync, nothing else was required (and the fix for the selection tool shouldn't involve much else, either for that reason).

LinguaPlone has come a long way to tackle a truly ambitious problem and I'm very sure, as of today, that Plone will prove to be one of the best solutions for managing multi-lingual content on the web. Again.