So.... dasBlog 1.2 nears completion and this will then also conclude the “feature rush“ for a while, because the allocated time for this “summer project” (5 weeks) is up and I have to shift gears. The last step for 1.2 is localization. Based on the user’s top preference in the Accept-Language header, dasBlog 1.2 presents all “hard coded” strings for publicly visible elements like the “Comment” link and the entire administrator interface in the preferred language, if the respective resources are available.

There’s now also an additional macro “localString” that you can use to define a multilingual expression in your templates: <%localString(“This is the English default|DE:Das ist die deutsche Alternative|IT:Questo e in italiano”)%>. This will resolve into German or Italian if that’s on the user’s language preferences list (Accept-Language header, again) and fall back to the default expression before the first delimiter if there’s no proper mapping. And, yes, you could also differentiate between “en-GB”, “en-US” and “en-CA”.

On the posting side, all posts are posted with the “invariant culture” (empty identifier) by default and will therefore show up on the blog independent of the user’s language preference. However, you can also select a language/culture pair when posting (for instance either “de” for German in general or “de-AT” for Austria, specifically) and then the post will only show up for users who have this language/culture listed in their browser’s language preferences. In the RSS feeds, the <item> tag will then carry the proper xml:lang designation (which propagates down to all its children as per XML 1.0).

By now, I have two complete language sets for the localized resources for English (en-US) and German (de-DE), but that’s as far as my “active” language skills take me. So if any of you folks out there (especially dasBlog users – hint, hint) have some 20 minutes of time and want to help me with localization into languages other than those two, grab the three files below (it’s just XML), translate the stuff between the <value> tags (except the topmost four) and send them, with the filenames reflecting the culture (such as Web.StringTables.ES.resx for Spanish), back to me at clemensv@newtelligence.com 

Of course, I will have to figure out how trust the correctness if I am getting translations into languages that aren’t from Latin or Germanic descent (most of those I can usually figure out), but that’s something to determine if and when it happens. For now, this is also a great experiment to see whether this little call for help yields any results. You’ll definitely get a permanent link and mention prominently on the dasBlog website and I can also put your blog into the blogroll that is included the setup archives, how’s that for a “payment”?