Language neutral content in Linguaplone 4.02 / Plone 4.0.4 is invisible

Question

We have a Plone site that is primarily in English but has some content translated to French, and to a smaller degree had some pages originally in French and translated to English. In Plone 3, this has been working fine.

In Plone 4, a user whose language is set to "fr" can see virtually nothing - only those pages with a translation to French.

If we run @@language-setup-folders it gets worse - now anything that is defined as "language neutral" is invisible to English users too.

Surely, the intended behaviour is that a user whose language is set to English will see folders in "/Plone/en/...", and a French user will see "/Plone/fr/...", but if the page is not found it should fall back to /Plone. This is not happening.

1. Should it?
2. If so, under what conditions?

Answer 1

LinuaPlone only supports "full translations", that is, for every article there must be a translation. Very bad for many use cases where you only have one main language and only a subset of all articles actually needs to be translated... :(

You should have a look at http://plone.org/products/raptus.multilanguageplone (and its dependency http://plone.org/products/raptus.multilanguagefields). These addons do what you want :)

Answer 2

You can still make items language neutral. And this way they can still appear in the site of the other language via a collection.

I think setting items to Language Neutral used to work via "manage translations", but now it still works via:

Edit > Categorization > language
Select language neutral

Answer 3

If you run @@language-setup-folders, you intitiate a setup that assumes that all content lives in the content-specific trees. The language folders are marked as INavigationRoot and will have the navtree and all anchored to the language folder.

You should basically assume each language to act as its own site with its own root.

— Except that translation management will keep "links" between translated versions of content and folders.

Answer 4

The language-neutral thing is a known bug, I believe. As to the fallback: as I understand it, the current behaviour is as follows: if you switch from en to fr and the current object does not have a fr translation the user is returned upwards towards the site root until there is a fr folder. (Or the root is reached.) No, I don't think that makes too much sense either, but at least a fr user will never see an en page. ;)