AdminCentral and public locales

This page describes two different types of language locale in Magnolia and how to configure Magnolia for them. The two locales influence the rendering of content in the AdminCentral and on a published page.

What is locale

Two locales in Magnolia

The question of "two locales" is connected with the types of users who access a Magnolia instance.

An ordinary internet user, new or returning, or even an application issuing REST commands – all of whom we shall call  visitor for simplicity – will usually only be able to see and interact with content of a published web project or website. The visitor will be interacting with a running public instance of Magnolia and will expect that the content of each page on the site will be available in a language he can understand or defines in his request, ideally in his native language. A visitor who's native language is English will prefer content in English (the screenshots are from the Travel Demo):

On the other hand, an editor, publisher or even a sysadmin – let's refer to them with the term  AdminCentral user  – working with the author instance of Magnolia may have different locale preferences than the visitor. An AdminCentral user's native and hence preferred language may be, for example, Spanish but the content being edited may still be in English. The AdminCentral user would probably welcome if

• Field labels and descriptions,
• Messages (alerts, warnings, information),
• App UI elements such as workbenches, columns, forms and actions, and 
• Buttons in the page editor in edit mode (used to open dialogs)

in the author instance (see also Types of translatable text) were displayed in Spanish rather than in English:

Magnolia has been built to deal with these two separate  locale preferences, that is with 

• Public Locale
• AdminCentral Locale.

Determining and setting the latter is fairly straightforward since the system users will usually know which locale they prefer. They can also set the locale themselves directly in the AdminCentral or they may always ask a user with superuser rights to set the preferred locale for them.

To determine public locale is slightly more difficult. Visitors usually access web content as anonymous users. Magnolia then has to rely on indirect means that point to the preferred locale of a visitor.

AdminCentral locale

The AdminCentral locale primarily defines the language of User interface labels which the AdminCentral user wants to interact in with the AdminCentral. This concerns, for example, the language of labels in the Action bar (English on the left, Korean on the right):

An incomplete localisation of a UI element may result in displaying a label in the fallback language, as shown below in the case the Copy page and Paste page actions:

Setting and configuring the AdminCentral locale

When logged-in in the AdminCentral, its users may set their language locale parameter via the Language field in the Edit user profile dialog. The setting will be reflected in the names of action menus, actions, buttons and labels throughout the AdminCentral provided the locale is one of the available system languages or it will fallback to English, the default fallback language (see also the configuration of available system languages and fallback language configuration).

To set the locale of the AdminCentral, open the pull down menu in the top right corner of the browser window and click the first row of the menu, titled Edit user profile if the current locale setting is English. On the Preferences tab:

• Choose a language in the Language field:
  
  With superuser role you may set language locales for other users, see how at Setting an editor's language preference.

The new locale will be applied the next time you login to the AdminCentral.

Public locale

Public locale influences the editorial content and template labels rendered on a visitor's device. Unless a visitor registers to a product or service and actively provides the preferred locale information, the public instance has to rely on other means that help identify the visitor's preferred locale.

Determining the preferred public locale

There are a number of ways of obtaining some form of locale information. Some of them use advanced techniques such as geolocation based on ping delay or topology, but one of the most common way is to look into the content of an HTTP request. At least the following three parts of an HTTP request are relevant to the identification of the public user's locale:

• the User-Agent header
• the Accept-Language header

• Request-URI

From the User-Agent header

While occassionally containing information such as en_US , for example in 

Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Konqueror/4.5; NetBSD 5.0.2; X11; amd64; en_US) KHTML/4.5.4 (like Gecko)

this locale information in the User-Agent header

• identifies the language variant of the software sending the request rather than the user's preferred locale, 
• is usually redundant,

• and more often than not is missing:

  Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/63.0.3239.84 Safari/537.36

Magnolia has no ready-made means how to check for the existence of and retrieve this type of locale information. The preferred locale information is communicated via the Accept-Language header.

From the Accept-Language header

The Accept-Language request header of an HTTP request defines which language variant of the page is preferred by the public user. This locale information may take one of the following three forms:

• <language>
• <locale>
• *

The first represents language expressed as a 2 or 3-character string, the second represents language as a full language tag, the third says "any language" (see Accept-Language and Language Tags in RFC-2616).

Additionally, the locale value that is sent in the header – optionally in a semicolon-delimited range for more languages – may be given an associated quality value ( q=<qvalue> ). The quality value represents an estimate of the user's preference for the languages specified by that range, for example:

Accept-Language: cs-CZ,cs;q=0.9,en-US;q=0.8,en;q=0.7

A site in Magnolia may be configured to reflect the locale information provided in the Accept-Language header,  see RequestLocaleAwareI18nContentSupport in the configuration section below.

From Request-URI

The most common form of Request-URI is that used to identify a resource on an origin server or gateway. For example:

/tour-type~active~.html

The preferred locale information may be sent to the server as a part of a  Request-URI , such as de in the following example:

/de/tour-type~active~.html

To configure a site in Magnolia to parse Request-URI for locale preference, see DefaultI18nContentSupport and HierarchyBasedI18nContentSupport in the configuration section below.

The I18nContentSupport interface

A key role in deciding which approach to apply to determine the preferred public locale is played by the I18nContentSupport interface. Its configuration is stored under /server/i18n/content . The entry point to this interface is via the I18nContentSupportFilter , usually set in /server/filters/i18n . The I18nContentSupport interface has the following implementations:

• AbstractI18nContentSupport, an abstract implementation which stores the locale specific content in node data having a local suffix: <name>_<locale>. The detection of the current locale, based on the URI for instance, is left to oane of the following three implementations.
• RequestLocaleAwareI18nContentSupport (relevant to the Accept-Language header case) Reads the locale from the Accept-Language header. This implementation does not render language specific URIs (see the classes below).
• DefaultI18nContentSupport (relevant to the Request-URI case described above). Used in the Magnolia Travel Demo, this implementation supports a language prefix in the URI, such as de for example. It checks if a node data with the <name>_<language> pattern exists on a content node:
  
  
  

• HierarchyBasedI18nContentSupport Same as above but for a hierarchy structure, for example:

  my-website
      ├─en
      │  ├─page-1
      │  └─page-n
      ├─de
      │  ├─page-1
      │  └─page-n 
      └─de_CH
         ├─page-1
         └─page-n 

  The locale code can be at whatever position in the URI, not necessarily the first one. For example, /my-website/node-1/node-2/de/home-page.html .

Configuring locale for a site

The configuration that defines the locale information for a site is usually located:

• In the Enterprise Edition under
  /modules/multisite/config/sites/<site-name>/i18n/locales
• In the Community Edition under
  /site/config/site/<site-name>/i18n/locales
  In the CE's Travel Demo bundle the configuration is extended from /modules/travel-demo/config/travel .

Properties