[Mediawiki-l] Multilingual Magic Words?

[Łukasz Garczewski]

On Mon, Aug 24, 2009 at 11:05 PM, John
Thomson<john at stonewayconsulting.ca> wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I manage a private wiki for an organization whose users are both English
> and French.  They would like to be able to use some of the Date & Time
> variable Magic Words, having the results displayed in the users'
> language of choice.  So, using {{CURRENTDAY}} would produce either
> "Monday" or "Lundi", depending.  I was rather surprised to see that just
> changing my user's preferences did not force this translation
> automatically, as it does for the interface and navigation links.
>
> When my language preferences are set to either "En" or "Fr", using the
> Magic Word {{LOCALMONTHNAME}} produces "August", invariably.
>
> Do I have to create a new extension to handle this kind of
> functionality, or should this just work and I am suffering from some
> unknown pilot error?

You must first understand the difference between the language of the
wiki (ContentLanguage) and the language set in the user's preferences
(UserLanguage).

While UserLanguage may change from user to user, and even for the same
user as he modifies his preferences, ContentLanguage stays the same
for any given wiki and will not change.

UserLang is used to display the correct *interface* to the user, while
ContentLanguage is used to display the *content* or *article*.

You are using the magic words mentioned within the article, which
means that, quite logically, ContentLanguage governs how they are
interpreted and rendered.

This is not a bug, but rather a matter of design.

-- 
Lucas 'TOR' Garczewski
Wikia Tech Team