AdminCentral and public locales

Generally speaking, a locale in computing is ``a set of parameters that defines the user’s language, region and any special variant preferences that the user wants to see in their user interface'' (Wikipedia).

Locale is more often associated with the language parameter, which is usually defined by a two-, three- or four-letter language code, standardized under ISO 639. See the IANA Language Subtag Registry for a complete list of available language codes and language variants.

The question of two locales is connected with the types of users who access a Magnolia instance.

An ordinary internet user, new or returning, or even an application consuming content as JSON or XML via REST API – all of whom we shall call visitor for simplicity – will usually only be able to see and interact with content of a published web project or website. The visitor will be interacting with a running public instance of Magnolia and will expect that the content of each page on the site will be available in a language he can understand or defines in his request, ideally in his native language. A visitor whose native language is English will prefer content in English (the screenshots are from the Travel Demo):

On the other hand, an editor, publisher or even a sysadmin – let’s refer to them with the term AdminCentral user – working with the author instance of Magnolia may have different locale preferences than the visitor. An AdminCentral user’s native and hence preferred language may be, for example, Spanish but the content being edited may still be in English. The AdminCentral user would probably welcome if the following items in the author instance (see also Types of translatable text) are displayed in Spanish rather than in English:

Magnolia has been built to deal with these two separate locale preferences:

Determining and setting the latter is fairly straightforward since the system users usually know which locale they prefer. They can also set the locale themselves directly in the AdminCentral or ask a user with superuser rights to set the preferred locale for them.

To determine public locale is more difficult. Visitors usually access web content as anonymous users. Magnolia then has to rely on indirect means that point to the preferred locale of a visitor.

The AdminCentral locale primarily defines the language of User interface labels which the AdminCentral user wants to interact in with the AdminCentral. This concerns, for example, the language of labels in the Action bar (English on the left, Korean on the right):

An incomplete localization of a UI element may result in displaying a label in the fallback language, as shown above in the case the Add page, Preview page, Copy page and some other actions.

Public locale influences the editorial content and template labels rendered on a visitor’s device. Unless a visitor registers to a product or service and actively provides the preferred locale information, the public instance has to rely on other means that help identify the visitor’s preferred locale.