How would we make this work: We have both Japanese and English here in Japan for our site. Presently we have an external feed creator to point the same content to two different areas in iTunes; Japanese area and English. If I take the task internal and use Joomla, I can translate the db content (via Joomfish) for the Bible Study extension but how would I use the B-Study extension to create the feeds to the two language areas in iTunes?

Can this be done with B-Study?

-John

Maybe...

Can you post an example of how you've got your multi-lingual site working now?

It may or may not work with JoomFish. But, it possibly could work if a Japanese translation file was developed. Right now, the podcast module is in whatever the default language is.

We can put this in as a Feature request for 6.2, but I don't know if we can promise anything.



Thanks,
d8

Having translations for the strings in B-Study is not the issue. (We might be able to assist with that at some point but this is the busiest time of year for us in our ministry. Maybe after the first of the year.)

As far as an "example", there's not much to see other than a regular Joomla site with Joomfish translation. I'll try to explain that part again:

Joomfish allows us to manage and maintain two "forks" of a given article. An XML flle along with some php code allows us to use a selector on the front end to select the language desired and then the XML file is used to point to the alternate version of the content in special tables in the Joomla DB.

For your extension, you have created Joomfish content elements directives that allow us to translate the contents of the content the B-Study extension maintains.

This is all "Good" and works fine as far as we can tell.

What needs to be taken into account in a truly multi-lingual environment for an extensiion such as B-Study, is that accommodating more than one language has to be addressed on both ends of the feed.

The problem is with feeds to iTunes:

iTunes allows us to create feeds to two different areas of the iTunes system; one to the English speaker's section, and one to the Japanese speaker's section. These feeds both point to the same message mp3s (or whatever) on the source of the feed; Joomla in this case.

Mr. Leblanc's core code, which I believe you are using, will allow more than one feed to be created. His code is designed to point to a Section / Category (and thus a set of articles) for each feed. His plugin allows a tag set to be placed into each article to include the link for the message recording file. Well, we could maintain two Section / Category / Article sets; one in English and one in Japanese, BUT, that creates a few issues;

1) Joomfish can't be used to select a language because the two article sets are not translated through Joomfish, they are just two article sets. BOTH of them have to be then exposed to both languages and this creates confusion for visitors of their respective languages.

2) Using article sets for posting sermons is low tech compared to B-Study AND now we have the two sets to maintain in separate areas of the site. Lot's of room for mistakes and other issues.

B-Study uses this code is to point to the B-Study DB that manages through a TON of different tables, to provide extensive detailed information and then links to each message. At the end of the day though, each sermon points to one or more message files.

Ok so..... The break down, is having a way to allow the creation of two feeds using the Leblanc code, (which is possible) and then point them both back to the same B-Study entry point. Joomfish will manage the two translations of the content and allow the visitor to select their langues, and then B-Study will point to the same message files.

Bottom line, B-Study is a rich mechanism to manage all kinds of helpful information about all aspects of a sermon. Joomfish support is available to manage the application strings and the content on the source side of the equation. The problem is it does not address the issue of why sites want to post feeds to more than one language on the iTunes end of the project. Leblanc's code will do it IF the front end of the Podcasting / Sermon management system is designed to allow generation of the feed for each language supported.

I hope my explanation is clear and now you better understand the issue at hand. My background and experience is working for software firms as a field engineer, and so I feel from a definition of the issues point of view I can be very helpful to this project. I have a working case scenario to confirm development success in.

We can set up a Skype call if you wish.

Thanks and blessings!

-John

"In life, we are either part of the problem, or part of the solution." - Anon

Ok, If i'm understanding this correctly, the problem is that, although the feed (podcast) is translated, it still writes to the same xml file? If that is the case, perhaps the easiest solution is the have the plugin detect the active language and prepend it to the filename of the xml.

Am i correct?

I'm sorry, no, the B-Study content is translated via the Joomfish content elements adding (to the B-Study). The message is (in our case) actually bi-lingual. We have a translation recorded in the message itself. This is the common practice for a live sermon (multi-lingual) recording.

We have to send TWO feeds to iTunes: One is to the English section of iTunes and one is to the Japanese area. The two language groups do not look in the other areas for possible feeds to subscribe to We need to create two feed XMLs: One for English and one for Japanese. It would be as though we had two separate podcasts as far as iTunes is concerned, they just happen to point to the same files from our server.

So if both feeds point back to the same B-Study entry point, and Joomfish is alowing for the translation of the B-Study content of the B-Study DB tables, then they will offer up the same message for each sermon.

I'm sorry if I was not clear. I hope this helps. I appreciate your looking at this. It will be like this for any bi-lingual (or more) recordings for users of this extension.

Blessings,

-John

I'm sorry its so hard to comprehend...

So the recording itself is bilingual (preached with a translator?) ... in the end, however, is there only one file uploaded to the website? Or, are the 2 languages separated from the initial file, in to 2 separate files (one for each language), and uploaded to the site in that manner?

I assumed it was something like this at first: