Hi Chris,
You seem very much on the defensive defending DNN's implementation of the forums. You need not be. I understand very well your argument that extending or adapting the functionality of the Forums would require work from the developers and that must be justifiable in terms of "How many users will profit from this". I understand also that when the Forum project was started, CL was not an issue yet, and choices may have been made that make it difficult to find an easy solution for the issue I lay before you.
But it remains true that there is an issue. Realizing this may help you in future decissions about the implementation, and who knows, someone may come up with the solution.
In the Languages and Localization forum Sebastian wrote:
The Internationalization team did provide some requirements and use cases, e.g.
- there are sites where each language is managed and edited separately (already covered by portals per language, either as individual domains for national subsidiaries, sub domains per country/language or child portals of a shared landing page),
- other sites, e.g. from many small and medium sized organizations in Europe, provide only parts of their content in foreign languages, while the bigger part of their content is addressing their national audience in their native language.
- A third use case covers international organizations and companies, which have to provide (nearly) all their content in multiple languages simultaneously.
I typically belong to the second group.Module localization is for my type of ML sites the ideal answer.I am currently testing the core ML solution, but I admit, I find it rather difficult to understand the correct procedures. I have no idea what percentage of DNN sites are ML and what percentage of those use module localization. Most of them will find it hard to migrate to core ML. You will be left with a number of sites, like it or not, that use non-core solutions for ML. Even for new dnn implementations, the choice between page localization and module localization will have to be made on practical considerations. Sites that belong to group 2 will likely prefer module-oriented localization.
On my sites, I will end up using the different modules within their limitations. If I cannot have a Khmer and an English forum module on one page and hide each module based on their language settings (the strategy of DSLocalizator) then I will not do that. The requirements of the university portal are not a forum, a blog, a repository, an event calendar, a news module etc. The requirements are: online posting of assignments, communication between students and academic staff, communication between academic staff on its own, facilitation of research, publication of research articles, e-learning, distant education, administrative announcements, publication of test results to name just a few.
At one point, we will have to start writing our own modules. But I need first to have a clear understanding of what can be achieved with the existing resources. Most modules work with module-level localization, sometimes with a few quirks. The forums do not. I do not expect this to change by Forums 5.0.0, nor by 6.0.0. Still, for theb support team, it may be good to remember, when clients ask "How do you..." the answer will be: "You cannot ..."