Sets of Translations
When you translate content into several languages in Joomla!, what you are doing is creating a different item for each language. Each item is assigned to a language and has the same content (translated) that another item in another language. For example, suppose you have a website with three languages, English, Spanish and French. For each content (category, menu, banner, article ..) you have to create three items, one for English, one for Spanish and one for French. And these three elements are related and have many things in common.
In KMFasTrans we have created the concept of Set of Translations. A Set of Translations is the set of items representing the same content in different languages. In the example above, we will have a Translations Set composed of 3 items. The figure below shows what we will see at the Translations Dashboard Screen:
As you can see in the figure each row has in the column 'Title' the source item title and in the column 'ID' the source item id. In this example the language of the source item is English because the Selected Source Language (in Language Tools) is English. There are also one column for each selected target language (French and Spanish in the example) that contain buttons to take several actions, an 'Actions in all selected target languages' column and the column 'Translations Set' that contains the information of the set of translations.
Hovering over each of the icons contained in these language columns you will see an explanatory text about its content and where appropriate a description of the action that will be taken when you press that id or image. Clicking the little down arrows, an information window with less frequent actions will be displayed.
(For a detailed explanation visit KMFasTrans Dashboard Help).
Translations Set column
The Translations Set column shows two attributes, the Set Number and the Set Status.
The Set Number is a number assigned by KMFasTrans when creating the set of translations. It is a unique number for the entire web site and can not be changed. If you delete a set of translations, its number will not be reused.
The Set Status indicates the current status of the set of translations and is identified by one or two images. When hovering the mouse over a image, a text is displayed as follows:
- Status: Not completed.
This state has two possible causes:
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- The set of translations lacks at least one translation id for some of the published content languages.
- Not all id's of the set are published (This depends on the value of the configuration option "Include published elements only for "Completion" of a Translations Set").
- Status: Completed.
The set of translations has been completed when it contains as many translation id's as published content languages, and also all such id's are published (This depends on the value of the configuration option "Include published elements only for "Completion" of a Translations Set"). As you can see in the example above, when you hover over the status image, the status and the completion date and time will be shown.
Each time you change the status of any id of the set to "Unpublished" or "Trashed", the set status will change to "Not Completed" regardless of the status it had before(depending on the value of the option mentioned above). When changing the status of an id of the set to "Published", the set status will change to "Completed" if it contains as many id's as published content languages and all of them are published(depending on the value of the configuration option mentioned above).
Warning: a set will not be allowed to contain an id assigned to language 'All', since by definition if an id is assigned to language 'All' it will be shown on all languages, and thus not required to be translated. For example, the module containing the login form will normally be assigned to language 'All', since the translation into every language is automatic using the standard Joomla! language files.
- Status: Modified.
The status "Modified" means that after completing the set of translations, at least some element of the set has been modified using the KMFasTrans edit form or the native Joomla editing form or the front-end editing form.
If the change is permanent, you can change the set status to "Completed" by clicking the checkbox in the row and the toolbar buttom 'Mark Set as Completed'.
If you changed the status of the modified id to unpublished, by changing later on its status to published, the set status will also change to "Completed"(depending on the value of the configuration option mentioned above).
Translations set details
By clicking on the button that contains the set number you will get the following screen with the contents of the set:
The first five lines show attributes of the Translations Set:
- Created on: date and time when the set of translations was created.
- Current status: current status of the set. The set is usually created in status "Not Completed". It can be created in status "Completed" if there are only two languages.
- Last status change: self-explanatory
- Last action taken: it can be Assign, Unassign or Modification of an Item.
- Last element modification: indicates who, when and which item was last modified.
The list below the first five lines contains the elements of the set. The values for the columns are self explanatory.
Creating a Translations Set
When you start using KMFasTrans the only existing translations sets are those created during the KMFasTrans installation, based on the existing Joomla associations at the time of installation. This may include Articles, Categories, Contacts, Menu Items and Newsfeeds, but does not include others such as Banners, Modules, Fields or Tags.
Apart from the previous ones, translations sets are automatically created when creating or editing element translations. Let's suppose for example that we start from an element without translation like 'Blue Mountain Rain Forest' represented in the following screens:
We can click on the 'Create' button on the French column to create a translation of 'Blue Mountain Rain Forest' into the French language, or
we can click on the 'Edit/Create' button on the 'Actions in all selected target languages' column to create a translation of 'Blue Mountain Rain Forest' into the French language, Italian language and Spanish language simultaneously.
In both cases we will obtain the KMFasTrans editing screen, in which we can create an element (article in this example) translation of the source element, in one or more languages simultaneously. When saving the elements, a set of translations that will contain the source item and all target items, will be automatically created. All equivalent Joomla! associations will be created simultaneously.
(For a detailed description of the use of the edit screen visit KMFasTrans New / Edit Translations Help).
The following screens show the situation after creating these elements:
And clicking in the translations set number 274 we get this details screen:
We can also create Translations Sets manually. If we have an item in a language that is the translation of the same content in another language, but they are 'isolated' we can create a Translations Set with both items.
What we have to do is click on the 'Associate' link of the column of the language in which is the item with which we want to create the set. In the following example we will associate an item in French language to the item 'Blue Mountain Rain Forest' in English:
When we click on that link we get the following screen:
We choose the appropriate item (in this example the only one 'Forêt tropicale de montagne bleue') and by clicking on the title, the set of translations will be created and we will obtain the following screen:
where we can see that a new set of translations has been created with number 275 that contains the source item (id = 64) and the newly associated item in French language.
If we hover the mouse over the Edit button in French we will see a popup with the title of the newly associated element.
Warning: the drop down list "Select Association:" must be set to "Not associated" to show only items that do not belong to any other set of translations. If you choose the value "Select Association", the list will contain all items in that language, whether or not they belong to another set of translations. In this case for each associated item you will see an association icon in the column 'Association' and you can see its associations by hovering over the icon. If you choose an item that already belongs to another set, such item will be disassociated from that set and associated to the set you are creating or updating.
The next screen shows how the previous screen would look if we had selected '- Select Association -' as the value of the drop-down:
Modifying and deleting a Translations Set
Using the links 'Change Association' and 'Disassociate', located in the same place as the link 'Associate' for existing items, we can modify the set of translations, adding, changing or removing elements from the set. The set of translations will cease to exist if we disassociate all its elements.