yawd-translations provides a set of tools for creating multilingual websites with django.

The application includes the following tools:

• Manage the website's installed Languages through the admin interface
• Generate translation messages (makemessages and compilemessages) for all installed applications and defined languages using the admin interface (no need to restart the web server).
• Translatable db models API
• A custom admin inline to manage db translations

• A custom middleware to replace django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware and achieve the following:

  • Change the way django detects language preference and use the db default language (set through the admin interface)
  • Redirects to language-dependant URLs are permanent (301) and not temporary (302).

• A patterns function (that behaves pretty-much like django's own i18n_patterns() does) to achieve the following:

  • Match root URL paths as default language URLs: If your default language is English (en), i18n_patterns() will not match the / URL as the english homepage and the django middleware would redirect pages to their /en/ equivalent (e.g. your homepage would be http://example.com/en/ and all requests to http://example.com/ would be redirected to http://example.com/en/). The custom patterns function implements the exact opposite, which is a common practice to web development. Therefore http://example.com/ will be matched as the real permalink (instead of http://example.com/en/). For non-default languages, the custom patterns function behaves like i18n_patters() does.

• A context processor to access available languages in your templates and a simple template tag to easily switch between the available translations of a page in the front-end website.

See the yawd-translations documentation for information on how to install the demo and use yawd-translations.