Serendipity Forums

Hi community,
I have added a new feature to the static-pages plugin, and now I need some experienced users to test it, before it can make it's way into the official plugin ... So you will ask: "What's it all about ??"

The facts:
As you might know, the static-page-plugin allows you to store a "language-flag" along with every static-page. So you are able to offer content to users from different countries if you wish. Especially the static-pages-list(sidebar-plugin) will only list static pages that are "flagged" with the language of the current visitor. Another feature already available is the ability to define one static page in every language to act as your blogs frontpage.

That sound great to me ... what the heck is missing ??
In fact there is one little feature missing, and that comes in, whenever a visitor of your page does not support(or request) any of the languages that you provide static pages for! He will neither see a static frontpage nor will he see a list of pages in the sidebar-plugin

And that's were my addon jumps in ...
... by adding just this little feature Nothing more and nothing less. In the config-page of the staticpage event-plugin you will find 2 new options.

• Fallback-language
• Available languages

So by setting the Fallback-language to e.g. "English", and storing "English", "German" and "French" as your available languages the static-page will provide visitors with these 3 languages as it did without my addon.
But if a visitor from e.g. Italy visits your page, he will see the list of english static pages as well as the english static frontpage(if available!)

Sounds interesting .. I want to test it!
Before you start testing this, please make backups of both your files and your database!!!
Download the plugin here: serendipity_event_staticpage-3.61.zip
And finally because pictures say more than thousand words ... here's a screenshot of the configuration-screen:

*Click for big version(919 x 485px, 60KB)*
You can also see my addon in action, over at my demoblog ...
For your convenience, there's a language-picker in the sidebar, so you can test it without changing the preferred languages of your browser.



Feedback required
Please let me know of any bugs you might find, but I would just as well be glad if you can report, that this works for you as expected!


In addition I have 1 more question
I decided to call this "Fallback-language" instead of "Default Language", because I felt, that this was rather confusing because it is not really a default language.
Let me know what you think about that ...


Looking forward to hear from you ...
Manfred.

*bump* ...
Is really nobody interested in this

Still hoping for feedback,
Manfred.

Hi Manfred,

if I find the time, I'm going to try to give your plugin a try over the weekend. I recently introduced two categories for German and English posts in my blog. Both are linked up with a static page.

Would you say that your plugin modification fits this use case? 'Cause I'm not really sure I'm correctly understanding what it does.

PM me, if you like.

- Mattsches

Hi: I found very useful your tool. But cannot achieve to show it at frontpage. Does it need be writen directly into the source code?


Thank you.

Israel Pacheco

mattsches wrote:Would you say that your plugin modification fits this use case? 'Cause I'm not really sure I'm correctly understanding what it does.

Hi mattsches,
I am not shure, whether my modification affects this useage at all, but I tend to say: NO.

The only thing my modification changes is the way that the static-pages plugin behaves, when it doesn't find static pages in the language, that the visitor of your blog "asks" for. This applies, if you either set "Use visitor's browser language as default" in the general configuration OR if you add the "Choose Language"-sidebarplugin.

Let's say that you only offer static-pages in german ... then any visitor that doesn't "ask" for german, will not see a list of static pages in the static-pages list(sidebar-plugin), and he will also not see a static-page defined to be the frontpage of your blog(if that exists)

With my modification you could still set "german" to be the "fallback-language" for static-pages and then they would appear even for visitors asking for other languages ...

The "real" idea for my addon comes in, if you offer static pages in at least 2 languages. Mainly in your mother tongue and in an "international" language(mostly english I guess). You could then offer one set of static pages in your mother tongue and a second set in english.
Then you'd set "english" to be the fallback-language and this will present your german opages to german visitors and your english pages to the "rest of the world".
Hope I could make this a bit clearer ?!
Maybe go and look at my demo-site, where you can see it in action, by choosing either "german, english or french" in the sidebar to see sets of static pages in theses 3 languages. Also note, that each of these languages has a static "frontpage". If you finally choose any other language, you will get the "fallback-case", where you will see the set of english static-pages again

Cheers,
Manfred.

israelp wrote:Hi: I found very useful your tool.

Hi Israel,
it's not "my tool" .. I just added a small feature to it

But cannot achieve to show it at frontpage.

Did you save one static-page with the "Make this page the frontpage of Serendipity"-option set to Yes ??

Cheers,
Manfred.

Hi: I do not want to use the option "Make this page the frontpage of Serendipity", what I got to do to include static page navigation at the front page?


Thank you.
israelp

Ok, thanks for the clarification. I installed your modification on my local dev installation nevertheless, and it works fine.

Regards
- Mattsches

israelp wrote:what I got to do to include static page navigation at the front page?

Hi Israel,
you will also have to install the sidebar-plugin "Static Page List".

Does that help?
Manfred.

mattsches wrote:...and it works fine.

Thanks for your feedback.

I will in return have to test that thing with a category linked to a static-page(or vice versa), because I have no idea what the effect of that is ...

Cheers,
Manfred.