Microsites and i18n

[TJ Keemon]

Hello-

Is it possible to run two microsites, each in a different language, on the same Open edX instance?

e.g.

courses.example.com ---- the main site

german.courses.example.com ---- the "german" microsite containing only German courses, FAQ, TOS, registration instructions, etc. 

french.courses.example.com ---- the "french" microsite containing only French courses, FAQ, ...

I know that it's possible to filter courses based on organization and that works fine. The trouble I'm running into is specifying a default language for a microsite so that the FAQ and all of the other pages are in the target language. 

There's no mention of i18n features in:

https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/wiki/Microsites-Theming

Does anybody have any suggestions?

Thanks.

-TJ

[Chris Dodge]

Hi TJ,

Thanks for your interest in Open edX!

I do a lot of work with Microsites, but I have a clarifying question: are you interested in 'force setting' a language in the LMS (including the courseware section) based on a subdomain?

You can certainly, have multiple microsites per runtime instance of Open edX - that's basically the point of Microsites, to support branding "multi-tenancy" - and each subdomain could be tied to a distinct microsite "key", with each microsite having translations in that particular language. Something like - in pseudo-config:

MICROSITE_CONFIG = {

    'my-site-en': {

         'subdomain': 'www',

         .....

    }, 

    'my-site-fr': {

         'subdomain': 'fr',

         ....

    },

    'my-site-es': {

         'subdomain': 'es',

    }, 

}

But going to - say - 'fr.mysite.com' would not force the courseware side of the LMS to forcibly be in French. Is that your question?

I'm going to have a project starting in the next few months which will likely have to better address I18N in Microsites, particularly regarding how to string-scrape the strings for translation. But that is several months off.

Also you should be aware that the Open edX team has a project underway to re-working theming in general. I don't have a URL offhand to pass along, but you should search this mailing list.

Best wishes,

Chris

@edx.org

[Felipe Montoya]

Hi TJ,

If I understand it right, this is exactly something we did in our fork of the platform. Take a look at https://github.com/eduNEXT/edunext-platform/tree/fmo/feature/force-lang-per-microsite.

Im looking at this in a mobile, so I could have found the wrong link. If I did, please at the same fork take a look at the common/djangoapps/edraak_i18n app and the microsite force_lang variable.

We worked on that, based on the good work by the folks at edraak and some microsites logic. If you have any questions, let me know.

--
Felipe Montoya

[TJ Keemon]

Hi Chris-

Thanks for the reply. I'm sorry, I guess I was a bit unnecessarily vague in my description. 

Here's our plan: We have a few courses that we are translating to other languages. We are doing this by creating a completely new course for each target language, copying the structure of the original English course, and replacing the videos, quizzes, etc. with the target language content.

So we'd have:

Intro Course 101 - English

Intro Course 101 - German

Intro Course 101 - French

Intermediate Course 102 - English

Intermediate Course 102 - German

Intermediate Course 102 - French

We don't want all of the courses existing in one place, and microsites is able to filter them perfectly.

The problems is that the LMS content around the courses are still in English. I guess it's partially due to my lack of understanding of i18n, but if I enable English, German, and French on the entire server via https://github.com/edx/edx-platform/wiki/Internationalization-and-localization what determines the displayed language? Is it a browser setting or is it determined by geolocation? I guess I wanted to "force set" a particular language on a per microsite basis because I thought that was the only way.

I hope that was a little clearer.

Thanks.

-TJ

[TJ Keemon]

Hi Felipe-

This looks like the exact solution to our problem. I'm going to take a closer look in the morning.

Thanks.

-TJ

[Chris Dodge]

Hi Felipe!

Good to hear from you again, and thanks for the input in regarding Microsites and I18N - I know your group is very active in using Microsites.

Thank again,

- Chris