Simplified Translation¶ ↑

The main idea of this plugin is to keep all field translations on the same table. I’ve worked with other Rails plugins but all of them have some caveats, and I needed something really simple.

With the release of Rails 2.2.X, with the I18n integrated now it’s easier to translate an Rails application, GetText is no longer needed. So I’ve added a few tasks which allow to extract translatable text from the models, views and controllers.

fesplugas@sueisfine:test_i18n $ rake -T i18n
(in /home/fesplugas/projects/simplified_plugins)
rake locales:autofill  # Autofill missing translations
rake locales:list      # List current locales
rake locales:missing   # List missing translation strings
rake locales:update    # Update locale files

Quick explanation¶ ↑

We have a page model with the following attributes.

Page: title_en, title_cat, title_es

By default Rails defines the current locale as :en and the default locale to :en. If we add translate :title to our model we can get the content of the attribute without defining the locale, and we’ll get the localized field.

@page_title = Page.find(:first).title

We can change the locale with I18n.locale.

I18n.locale = :cat
@page_title = Page.find(:first).title

And we’ll get the title attribute of the defined locale.

Large example¶ ↑

##
# app/views/welcome/index.html.erb
#
<%=t "Today is {{value}}.", :value => Date.today %>

##
# app/controllers/welcome_controller.rb
#
class WelcomeController < ApplicationController

  def index
    @text = translate "Today is {{value}}.", :value => Date.today
  end

end

##
# app/controllers/application.rb
#
class ApplicationController < ActionController::Base

  before_filter :set_locale

  def set_locale
    I18n.locale = params[:locale] || 'es'
  end

end

Sample migration¶ ↑

class CreatePages < ActiveRecord::Migration

  def self.up
    create_table :pages do |t|
      t.string :title_en, :null => false
      t.string :title_es, :null => false
      t.string :title_cat, :null => false
      t.text :content_en, :null => false
      t.text :content_es, :null => false
      t.text :content_cat, :null => false
      t.boolean :status, :null => false, :default => false
    end
  end

  def self.down
    drop_table :pages
  end

end

Model definition¶ ↑

##
# app/models/page.rg
#
class Page < ActiveRecord::Base
  translate :title, :body
end

Usage from the console¶ ↑

$ script/console
Loading development environment (Rails 2.2.2)
>> I18n.default_locale
=> :en
>> I18n.locale
=> :en
>> Page.first.title
=> "Hello World"
>> I18n.locale = :es
=> :es
>> Page.first.title
=> "Hola Mundo"
>> Page.first.update_attributes :title => "Hola Mundo"
=> true
>> Page.first.title
=> "Hola Mundo"
>> I18n.locale = :undefined
=> :undefined
>> Page.first.title
=> "Hello World"    <== Because is the default locale

Copyright © 2008-2009 Francesc Esplugas Marti, released under the MIT license