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Very clear. I eagerly look forward to your patch. Maybe you can also have a look at the pathway and mod_rewrite problems you have detected ? Thanks for the help !

PS. SVN works again.

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Johan Janssens - Joomla Co-Founder, Lead Developer of Joomla 1.5

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http://www.nooku.org - Extension development framework for Joomla

Oh, the party has just started!

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Hi, Jinx!

I've just tested this "downgrading function" (yesterday's build) and it doesn't work with Cyrillic characters: all Cyrillic characters are escaped and unreadable. By the way, colon ":" is also escaped (I agree with those asking to change it to the dash "-").
"Search Engine Friendly URLs" option works incorrectly with Cyrillic characters. For example, for the menu item with the title: "Отдых и путешествия" - I have this link: "http://mysite-local/index.php/--" - all characters are gone except two spaces 

I looked into the code (function stringURLSafe) and I think that you should use here (and also for "Search Engine Friendly URLs") other method for what you called "downgrading". This is "transliteration", see description in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transliteration.

As I understand, the method of transliteration is Language-specific (not character specific!), so this function should use some (global) parameter, that sets method of transliteration.

I understand, that it is impossible to implement many (named) methods of transliteration quickly, but you may start with a couple and create carcass, that will be filled with new transliteration methods later... (I may fill "Russian transliteration"...)
... And it appears, that this Transliteration function should be part of Joomla i18n (Internationalization) library

In fact, the above link to Wikipedia contains much info about transliterations.

PS: Of cause, smart transliteration requires "Language" attribute for every string, so there would be no need for any global "Transliteration method" parameter...

Thank you for your work,
--
Yuri

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Until now I couldn't find the implementation of redirect/javascript-safe urls in JRoute? And how about my other question in this thread?

So long... Mark

To a non-coder, the transliteration suggestion above by yuri does make sense.
If it is the method ultimately chosen, it would be useful to know if the tables of equivalence (other than a default extended latin one that should be IMO included in core) would/could/should be taken care of by Translation partners.

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Jean-Marie Simonet / infograf · http://www.info-graf.fr
Multilanguage in 2.5: http://help.joomla.org/files/EN-GB_multilang_tutorial.pdf
---------------------------------
Joomla Translation Coordination Team • Joomla! Production Working Group

I like the idea of transliteration but... by a joomla developper point of view, does it make sense or not?

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former Q&T WorkGroup Joomla member - Italian Translation Team Member

Hi all,

I'm back on track after my Asia Adventure. Following changes have been made to the routing API :

- Improved slugs to always use a '-' instead of a '_' to seperate the id from the slug.
- Added support for URL escaping, to allow safe javascript URL's. JRoute, now has an extra parameter to turn escaping on and off. By default it's on.

Johan

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Johan Janssens - Joomla Co-Founder, Lead Developer of Joomla 1.5

http://www.joomlatools.eu - Joomla extensions that just work
http://www.nooku.org - Extension development framework for Joomla

Thanks. Off to download and test now.

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Transliteration could indeed be a possible solution to solve the 'URL' downgrading problems. The issue with transliteration is that PHP doesn't offer a solution to do it. Which means we need to reside to PHP libraries that can handle this. We could use Harry his utf8_to_asciilibrary which he ported from Perl Text::Unicode solution. As Harry describes in his blog postit is not full proof and doesn't offer support for all languages.

In an ideal world we should not need to reside to using transliteration for URL's slugs. Browsers these days are capable of showing encoded URL's in a readable way. Opera does this and so does IE. FireFox on the other hand doesn't, you need to change the FF settings to make it do this. This is done for security reasons and to prevent phising.

So far I'm undecided about the best possible solution and it seems we are not the only CMS struggling with this kind of problem, I found the following post on the django mailing list : http://groups.google.com/group/django-d ... e24ad26ded

_________________
Johan Janssens - Joomla Co-Founder, Lead Developer of Joomla 1.5

http://www.joomlatools.eu - Joomla extensions that just work
http://www.nooku.org - Extension development framework for Joomla

Agreed, this is not just a problem for CMS systems but the internet as a whole.

Even after 20 years, ICANN is still struggling and testing to roll out TLDs with utf8 characters. They may have them ready in 2008 (http://www.allheadlinenews.com/articles/7006729310). From what I've read their solution maybe to place an upper limit on the number of characters that can be transliterated and say "Sorry for now..." to the languages left out.

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Just checking if what I get is what is supposed to be obtained:

7042: The slug is taken from the Content Title Alias while the page Title is from the Content Title (for a content).

_________________
Jean-Marie Simonet / infograf · http://www.info-graf.fr
Multilanguage in 2.5: http://help.joomla.org/files/EN-GB_multilang_tutorial.pdf
---------------------------------
Joomla Translation Coordination Team • Joomla! Production Working Group

At the moment the slug is either taken form the alias if present or it is auto-generated based on the title of the item (for example in weblinks). For content articles, page title are generated based on the title of the article. Slug and page title are unrelated in terms of code and API's.

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Johan Janssens - Joomla Co-Founder, Lead Developer of Joomla 1.5

http://www.joomlatools.eu - Joomla extensions that just work
http://www.nooku.org - Extension development framework for Joomla

Hmmm... maybe this is the solution?

I mean, taking the slug from the alias title systematically. It would therefore be the responsability of the admin/publisher to make sure it only contains ANSI glyphs?

My 2 cents.

_________________
Jean-Marie Simonet / infograf · http://www.info-graf.fr
Multilanguage in 2.5: http://help.joomla.org/files/EN-GB_multilang_tutorial.pdf
---------------------------------
Joomla Translation Coordination Team • Joomla! Production Working Group

It seems to me a simple (or perfect) ready solution with no problem for our developpers too

_________________
former Q&T WorkGroup Joomla member - Italian Translation Team Member

That's a solution, means we need add alias support to all parts of the system that don't have it at the moment. This requires a database change, i'll need to discuss this with the dev working group.

_________________
Johan Janssens - Joomla Co-Founder, Lead Developer of Joomla 1.5

http://www.joomlatools.eu - Joomla extensions that just work
http://www.nooku.org - Extension development framework for Joomla

This is a formal solution: "No ANSI title alias - no slug in the URL"  . In life it may work for sections and categories, that are added relatively seldom. But I think, that many users won't bother to spend their time, manually "transliterating" titles of "news". This is dull and and tedious work, and the System should be kind enough to its users to help them especially in such tasks!

I think, that users must have an option for every item: whether alias (and so - slug) is generated automatically (and changed in sync with title), using transliteration, or alias is manually edited by user ("Custom alias"). With ability to choose default behaviour for new items.

So, automatic transliteration is not an alternative to the alias, but is a smart optional behaviour, "feature" of the System.
And, in any case, the System should not generate slugs for items, that don't have "good" title alias.

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Well that all makes sense, you wanna put that in code 

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Johan Janssens - Joomla Co-Founder, Lead Developer of Joomla 1.5

http://www.joomlatools.eu - Joomla extensions that just work
http://www.nooku.org - Extension development framework for Joomla

Well, I may make a code to implement transliteration in Joomla.

Current task, that it will solve, would be to transliterate string from "Content language" (Article already has such "Advanced parameter", but as I see, it is not stored anywhere yet  ...) to English. But I think, that the "transliteration API" should handle any pair of languages. If somebody will need additional transliteration method, he will add it (in a form of some language.ini file...)
As I see it now, result of my work may be:
1. Additional method of JLanguage class (The class is initialized with the "Source Language"):
  function Transliterate( $StringToTransliterate, $DestinationLanguage = 'en-GB', $TransliterationMethod = 'default') { ... }
2. Some method to list all existing transliterations ( SourceLanguage, DestintionLanguage, TransliterationMethod). To be used by user interface to set user preferences...
3. Implemented transliteration from 'ru-RU' to 'en-GB' - as an example for other implementations.
4. Some description and usage suggestions...

Everything else is out of my scope.
Is it OK?

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Text of all my messages is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

You can definitly go ahead with this, I only don't think we will be able to get it all into 1.5. Currently we are trying hard to finish up beta 2 and transliteration is going to be a too big off a change to get in. This doesn't mean that your work will be invain. It could prove very valuable for a future version, or you could probably even put it in a plugin tio improve the routing in that way.

_________________
Johan Janssens - Joomla Co-Founder, Lead Developer of Joomla 1.5

http://www.joomlatools.eu - Joomla extensions that just work
http://www.nooku.org - Extension development framework for Joomla

Unfortunately, intellectual usage of this transliteration function, as we discussed it before, has to be integrated deep inside Joomla code (e.g. in the content edit procedure..., in "slug construction" procedures for Sections and Categories...).  So, Joomla has to (or may) call Transliterate method from a number of places.
I mean, my work makes sense only if these calls to the Transliterate method will be inserted in the Joomla core. After this, my work to actually implement transliteration will be in only one file from the Joomla core: "libraries\joomla\i18n\language.php".

Jinx, if you're planning to make some refactoring of the "slug construction" (that currently doesn't work for e.g. cyrillic characters...), I think it will be proper time to insert calls to Transliteration method (described in my previous message) right now?! Currently this method may simply return the same string, that is on its input (and this will be the same for "English language content" transliterating to en-GB after implementing the transliteration).

... I thought a while, and I think, that I may prepare (post here or what?)  first implementation of this transliteration functions in a couple of days.

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Oke, let's do that and then take it from there.

_________________
Johan Janssens - Joomla Co-Founder, Lead Developer of Joomla 1.5

http://www.joomlatools.eu - Joomla extensions that just work
http://www.nooku.org - Extension development framework for Joomla

As a first step in preparation to implement Transliteration, I refactored (in fact, cleaned a little) "www\libraries\joomla\i18n\language.php" file (see attachement). Here are my notes:

1. "$lang =& JFactory::getLanguage();" - returns userdefined or site default language, so THIS language can not be (inconditionally) used for transliteration.

I propose to add (optional) parameter to the JFactory::getLanguage()
JFactory::getLanguage($langTag = 'default')
(and, of cause JFactory should store several languages)
- so this funtion may be used to get desired language (e.g. language of the content to transliterate)

2. function _parseINILanguageFiles
seems to be some rudiment of the past:
- it uses undefined (legacy) function JParameter::parse
- it is not used anywhere in Joomla code

I propose to delete it.

3. I refactored the file, changing "$lang" and "$language" to "langTag" where it IS a tag (e.g. 'EN-GB')
and leaving '$lang', where it is JLanguage class/object ( $lang is generally used in Joomla code for "JLanguage" ).
Also renamed "$languages" to "$langTags" for array of tags.

4. Descriptions were corrected and made more consistent:
- "Language tag" term instead of different variations: "language", "language code", "name of the language", etc.

5. function load( $prefix = '', $basePath = JPATH_BASE )
parameter $prefix renamed to $suffix, because it actually IS suffix:
---
  $filename = empty( $prefix ) ?  $this->_langTag : $this->_langTag . '.' . $prefix ;
---

6. Fixed: function exists($langTag, $basePath = JPATH_BASE)
- it gave wrong result, if called with different $basePath-s
- if exists it returned langTag, but not boolean true.

7. I don't know PHP well enough, but what is the reason to call method of the JLanguage class from inside the class with 'JLanguage::' prefix?
e.g. is it the same inside JLanguage class?!
$knownLanguages = JLanguage::_parseLanguageFiles($dir);
$knownLanguages = self::_parseLanguageFiles($dir);

I didn't changed this, because I don't see any use of "self" keyword in Joomla code .

8. In JLanguage class deleted the "protected" var:
var $_identifyer = null;
- it is just the same as another var ( var $_langTag = null;)
- it is not used anywhere.

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Hi, Jinx!

I prepared first implementation of Transliteration functionality, see file transliteration003.zip attached.
It contains:
1. www\language\ru-RU\ru-RU.xml - updated Russian language file, containing transliteration metadata
2. www\libraries\joomla\i18n\language.php - updated JLanguage class + new JTransliteration class
3. www\components\com_content\views\article\tmpl\default.php - "article" view template to which I appended "JLanguage and transliteration test".

Your move 
--
Yuri

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Compliments to yvolk - What a fast work done! Great!

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former Q&T WorkGroup Joomla member - Italian Translation Team Member

Calling the class this way is for PHP4 compatibility reasons, bacause self is not supported by PHP4. It IS supported by PHP5.
Sounds like good work, these developments.

Cheers, Mark

There's one issue with JRouter in older versions of PHP.  Namely in _parseApplicationRoute there is a call to strpos( $url, $item->route ), but when $item->route is empty (when you have a separator menu item) it throws an error.  The following is a fix for that:

Just to reply to this topic as I've been working w/ JLanguage quite a bit lately.

JLanguage updated in Rev 7085.



It does not appear to be used within the Joomla 1.5 system, but that doesn't mean no one else is using it.  Not sure.  I'll ask some of the other devs where it comes from.



Has been renamed to $extension.



Yes, I see the problem with the basePath, but with the current code it does return a boolean value.  I've fixed the code.



I'm not sure what the original intention of this variable was.

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Hi, tcp!

As I see, we did some work on this language.php file in parallel, and naturally, solved some issues in different ways.

But, I made _MUCH_ more changes to the language.php file, that you cited (see file attached to my message dated March 30, 2007, 04:48:37 PM)! These changes and corrections are both in code and comments (i.e. documentation) of this file.
Please, do not let this work to get lost: merge my changes to the code repository (I'm not eligible to do this myself  ). - Now I don't talk about my later additions concerning JTransliteration class. It's another story, that waits for Jinx...

Thank you.
--
Yuri

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I spoke to Jinx ( we're in DC now ) and this is also a architectural issue as well as a code issue.  At the moment we're focusing on finishing Beta 2 and transliteration will have to wait, I'm afraid.  Sorry, but please understand everyone is itching to have B2 done.

In San Fran, they want Joomla B2.
[img width=400]http://laughingsquid.com/wp-content/uploads/zombies_sf_4.jpg[/img]

In Lego Land, they want Joomla B2.
[img width=400]http://www.brickshelf.com/gallery/Nabii/Adventurers/Cthulego-Rises/08-zombies.jpg[/img]

So if we don't get B2 done, I don't even want to think what will happen.  Save Yourself!

[img width=400]http://www.horrordvds.com/reviews/a-m/mutant/mutant_shot4l.jpg[/img]

So at the moment, my priority is not to be eaten alive by zombies.  If you find any bugs w/ JLanguage or would like to make suggestions, we have a thread going on here.

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@Yvolk : More changes to JLanguage

- _parseINILanguageFiles removed
- identifier class variable removed

@Whurley : fix for JRouter applied

Johan

_________________
Johan Janssens - Joomla Co-Founder, Lead Developer of Joomla 1.5

http://www.joomlatools.eu - Joomla extensions that just work
http://www.nooku.org - Extension development framework for Joomla