Usage

The mothertongue application provides an abstract translation class that you can subclass your own models from to allow you to serve multilingual data. This model works out the current language of the request using django’s inbuilt translation modules and mothertongue’s custom context processor. When the model is queried the relevant content based on the current request is returned.

In order to use mothertongue’s model translation you can follow the example code below

An example model

This demonstrates a model that utilises django-mothertongue to translate two of its fields:

# import stuff we need from django
from django.db import models
from django.conf import settings
from django.utils.translation import get_language, ugettext, ugettext_lazy as _

# import translation stuff
from mothertongue.models import MothertongueModelTranslate

# Create your models here.
class GenericPage(MothertongueModelTranslate):
    title = models.CharField(_('title'), max_length=200, help_text=_('Title for your page'))
    content = models.TextField(_('content'), blank=True, help_text=_('Copy for your page'))
    translations = models.ManyToManyField('GenericPageTranslation', blank=True, verbose_name=_('translations'))
    translation_set = 'genericpagetranslation_set'
    translated_fields = ['title','content',]

    def __unicode__(self):
        return u'%s' % self.title

# chunks translations model
class GenericPageTranslation(models.Model):
    generic_page_instance = models.ForeignKey('GenericPage', verbose_name=_('generic_page'))
    language = models.CharField(max_length=len(settings.LANGUAGES)-1, choices=settings.LANGUAGES[1:])
    title = models.CharField(_('title'), max_length=200, help_text=_('Title for your page'))
    content = models.TextField(_('content'), blank=True, help_text=_('Copy for your page'))

    class Meta(object):
        # ensures we can only have on translation for each language for each page
        unique_together = (('generic_page_instance', 'language'),)

    def __unicode__(self):
        return u'%s' % self.language

An example admin.py file

This basically adds an inline model to the sample model and allows you to add a translation for a total of 2 languages (French and Spanish). The languages allowed here are the same as those you specified in your settings file:

# import stuff we need from django
from django.contrib import admin
from django.conf import settings

# import app specific shit
from myapp.models import GenericPage, GenericPageTranslation

# create the inline to handle translation
class GenericPageTranslationInline(admin.StackedInline):
    model = GenericPageTranslation
    extra = 1
    max_num = len(settings.LANGUAGES)-1
    fieldsets = (
        (None, {
            'fields': ['language',]
        }),
        ('Translation', {
            'fields': ['title','content'],
            'classes': ['collapse',],
        }),
    )

# create the admin model
class GenericPageAdmin(admin.ModelAdmin):
    fields = ['title', 'content',]
    inlines = (GenericPageTranslationInline,)

# register with CMS
admin.site.register(GenericPage, GenericPageAdmin)

An example views.py file

This example show a very, very simple view and just grabs the first record in the database for translation, just for demonstration purposes:

# import stuff from django
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response
from django.template import RequestContext
from myapp.models import GenericPage

# very simple homepage view for demo purposes.
def home(request):

    home_copy = GenericPage.objects.all()[0]

    # render the response
    return render_to_response('default.html', {'home_copy':home_copy}, context_instance=RequestContext(request))

An example template file

This example shows the displaying of the record retrieved in the example view and shows you how to use the mothertongue_language_nav system:

<h1>django-mothertongue example template</h1>

<h2>Demo navigation</h2>
<p>Persists current page, state and URL querystring when changing language via this nav</p>
{% if mothertongue_language_nav %}
<ul>
    {% for item in mothertongue_language_nav %}
    <li class="lang lang-{{ item.code }}{% if item.last %} last{% endif %}">
            <a href="{{ item.url }}">{{ item.name }}</a>
    </li>
    {% endfor %}
</ul>
{% endif %}

<h2>Display of translated model data</h2>
<h3>{{home_copy.title|safe}}</h3>
<br/><br/>
{{home_copy.content|safe}}

<h2>Example link using the django url tag which persists the language prefix</h2>
<a href="{% url home %}" title="Home" hreflang="{{LANGUAGE_CODE}}">Home</a>