Get on Rails with Globalize: a comprehensive writeup in 8 parts
posted: November 10th, 2006 · by: Sven
I don’t know where you’re coming from. But my former experiences using I18n solutions have never been so much fun.
I’ve been absolutely thrilled about Globalize. Imagine to just plug-in some extension and instantly being able to use simple, intuitive mechanisms to translate your (now multi-language) application. Wouldn’t that be wonderful exactly the way you’d expect a Rails solution for your most common programming problems to work?
Well, Globalize is just that. Globalize is a powerful, yet elegant and usable Rails plugin that’s here to help you with the translation and localization of:
- arbitrary text like in templates (“hello world!”), mails, messages, etc.
- model data like text that goes in the database as part of your ActiveRecord classes
- stuff like dates, time, numbers, currency etc.
This series is here to help you get started and get the most out of Globalize.
Read the rest of this entryStarting an article series on Globalize
posted: November 10th, 2006 · by: Sven
Yes. I finally managed to finish the (first version of the) first part of my series “Get on Rails with Globalize”.
My idea with this write-up is to provide a complete summary of everything about and around Globalize – which IMO is the most complete, most elegant and (notably) most Rail’ish I18n solution available.
I thus started weeding through the archives of the Rails I18n and the Globalize mailing list (well, sort of, I needed to use my local archive to weed the latter because it’s badly missing an online archive so far), the Globalize wiki and several other ressources Google came up with.
I started my work on this series by the end of August, having been timed-out by obligations and stuff again and again. It also actually took me a while to collect and sieve out the relevant bits of information, check their up-to-dateness (e.g. of bug reports), sort and split everything into chunks and topics. But hey, I think this will have been worth that while. So … finally … here we go :-)
Real fun: Get on Rails with Globalize (take #2)
posted: June 13th, 2006 · by: Sven
This article is a bit outdated and has been replaced by an entire series in the meantime: “Get on Rails with Globalize: a comprehensive writeup in 6 parts”.
This is the second version of my writeup about Globalize. My first attemp was too much a literal protocol of my actual steps – which haven’t actually mixed that well with a newbie intro to Globalize. So simply let’s start over.
I initially really shyed away from translating a pretty simple application just because of my previous experiences with t10n/i18n libraries that were nothing else but a big pain and hassle …
Ever felt the same? Then here’s some good news for yor. If you’re going to add multi-language support to a Ruby on Rails application I suggest you give Globalize a serious try.
The docs are a bit spare so at first it seemed to me that things don’t work as announced (or: at all). But once I understood how Globalize works everything went like a charm and was incredibly simple to use (at least for the very basic stuff I’ve tried so far).
So, I’ll put together how things worked for me.
Read the rest of this entryReal fun: Get on Rails with Globalize
posted: June 9th, 2006 · by: Sven
Update: If you’re interested in reading about my adventures … this article might be for you. But if you’re interested in getting started with Globalize then please refer to this follow-up version of this article.
I first shyed away from adding multi-language support to folksr (my experimental voting application) ... mostly because of my previous experiences with t10n/i18n libraries and tools which were basically nothing else but a big pain.
Ever felt the same? Then there’s some good news for you. If you’re going to add multi-language support to a Ruby on Rails application I suggest you give Globalize a serious try.
The docs are a bit spare so at first it seemed to me that things don’t work as announced (or: at all). But once I understood how to Globalize works it went like a charm and is incredibly simple to use (at least for the mostly very basic stuff I’ve tried so far).
I’ll put together how things worked for me.
Read the rest of this entry