I reported this to DNN sales, so I suspect it has been made known to the dev team, but I think its my responsibility to get it on the record here. CLEARLY, DNN v5.5 content localization is NOT READY for commercial use. After hearing and watching Shaun Walker demonstrate it in Wednesday's webinar and state that it is released in 5.5, I heard no reason not to expect stable functionality. It not only isn't stable, the lack of documentation for this relatively complicated solution makes it almost certain that 1,000s of users will experience a negative outcome.

Summary of initial tests, which I think represent a real-life scenario:

1. Duplicated a live portal configuration (DNN 5.1.4), consisting of six portals. Altered five of the portals to become child portals. Browsed through the sites and all seemed working properly.
2. Downloaded and applied the DNN 5.5 upgrade package. Due to Telerik.Web.UI.dll mismatches created by the 5.5 upgrade, errors occurred, and had to manually install the 2010 version into /bin folder and update the web.config to match. Browsed through the sites and all seemed working. Set the home page of primary portal to require login and set noindex/nofollow to avoid sites conflicting with public live versions.
3. Enabled localizations in host menu, then added three languages on Admin menu (Korean, Japanese, and Filipino) on the primary portal (www.adrchawaii.com) . (Filipino didn't include a flag - why not? It's not like the Philippines doesn't have a well-known flag.) All seemed to be proceeding so far so good.
4. Clicked "Enable Content Localization" to start the conversion process. Popup window showed progress of creating pages (33)  for each of the 3 new languages. After 20 minutes or so, noticed that progress was not advancing. At about 45 minutes, closed the popup window (did not Cancel, just clicked the close window icon).
5. Visited home page (logged in as Host). No content. Page has three main HTML modules with text/graphics, and a couple other HTML modules for footer, skip nav, etc.. All the content was gone, although the module titles seemed in place.
6. Visited About Us page and observed same. Content gone. Looked in module editor, there was no content history. Tried to figure out if this had to do with "Publish" and "Translated" features, but since this is the default language, that didn't make sense. Where had the content gone?
7. Visited a wiki page and noticed it still had the original English content.
8. Willing to experiment further, tried to "Enable Content Localization" of one of the child portals. In this setup, the primary portal is sort of a landing site, with basic information and navigation to the child portals. (See www.hawaiiadrc.org for live example without content localization.) The child portals have a fair amount of content, using variety of DNN and third-party modules. HTML, Events, Announcement, Links, FAQ, Gallery, Feedback, XMOD, DNNMasters Content Builder, DNNMasters SEO Provider...
9. Similar to the first run on primary portal, this process eventually hung up. I let it run for 90 minutes, most of which time it had hung on one file during the creation of the 32 page (of 42) for the 3rd language (of 3). I again closed the progress popup window.
10. The results this time were also symptomatic of severe code errors. Some pages have no content, the menu bar (six items) now has a menu item for each of the four languages. That is, Home, Home (fi-PH), Home (ko-KR), Home (ja-JP),...! At least one page showed what appeared to be the results of a bug wherein many copies of a module are created (perhaps those were for the "Show on all pages" modules as I saw that reported as a bug earlier).

I hope these summaries help. I am leaving the sites as is for now. If someone on the technical team wants to survey the sites, or if you want a copy of the database and files, I am happy to help provide that.

I'm an "old timer" with 30 years in software. I'm a great believer in open source, and DNN. (But you really need to take standards and accessibility more seriously!) But in my opinion your best recourse for now is to stop allowing 5.5 to be downloaded, or at least disable the "Enable Content Localization" feature until these problems are fully resolved. Maybe the code works great in situation where DNN is installed from scratch, a user enables localication, and then builds pages/modules/content one at a time. But the conversion process has severe issues.

Good luck! I wanted to use this to show off localization to several clients (U.S. government agencies). But I will need to wait.

Thank you,
Shawn

there are known issues, see http://www.dotnetnuke.com/Community/Forums/tabid/795/forumid/77/threadid/382143/scope/posts/threadpage/3/Default.aspx

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Cheers from Germany,
Sebastian Leupold

   

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