Apply I18 to Ruby on Rails Completed Site. - ruby-on-rails

I am new to Internationalization(I18). I want to apply I18 to my Ruby on Rails site but the problem is site is already complete and I don't want to go to each HTML page change the code. I want my site in English, French, and Spanish language.
Please show me the way and I appreciate any example or tutorial for I18.
Thanks.

Unless the development team on your inherited site had future-I18n on their mind when they made the site (e.g. strings are not hardcoded but reference values found in config/locales/en.yml using the I18n.translate method), then you will have no choice but to go in and change every file that uses strings you want to translate.
I'm sure you've already found the following references, but just in case, you should probably start with these:
Rails I18n guide
Rails I18n Railscast
Rails I18n backends Railscasts
Other Rails I18n questions on StackOverflow
As #Dougui pointed out, you probably have a fair amount of work ahead of you.

Sorry but I think there is no way to do this. It's just a very long work... Good luck!

Related

Getting more Ruby On Rails Helpers

I am completely new on Ruby On Rails and I already watched a long tutorial to start developing a small web application. In such a tutorial I could see several helpers for textboxes, textareas, dates, times, checkboxes, radiobuttons, comboboxes, and so on.
Where can I find other helpers like accordions, WYSIWYG editors (like an HTML editor), and others that can be bound to data from model and used in views? Maybe a toolbox for example.
I will very much appreciate your feedback.
Best regards.
What you're mostly talking about are Form Helpers. There are a bunch of other Rails Guides so I'd recommend reading through them and getting a better idea of what Rails does and can provide.
If you're not finding what you need in that documentation, you may need to add a 3rd party gem to your app's Gemfile, and follow the gem's documentation for getting it working. The Ruby Toolbox is a good place to start searching if you want to see which gems are most common.
And, of course, in the end you might not be able to find something that someone else already wrote and that solves your problem, in which case you will need to write it yourself. For front-end stuff you'll want to get up to speed on how to use HTML, CSS, and Javascript.

Embed Blog in Ruby on Rails

I have a Ruby on Rails application and want to include a blog inside the application.
I was wondering what's the best way to do that. I don't want to have a link to an external blog. I want the blog integrated in my application. Also i don't have the time to programm the blog functionality. I want to use existing solutions.
What's the best way to accomplish that? Any recommendations? What are the best solutions?
The best way to include one application within another is by using engines. This might help you Ruby on Rails 3.1 Blog Engines
Perhaps Typo would address your needs installed as a Rails Engine.
Since nobody has done it so far I need to mention here that the spirit of Rails is to make everything friendly enough so that you can code your own.
It's a bit more work but then your blog module fits right in with the rest of the app.

Does Ruby on Rails affect how a web page looks?

Most of the time, whenever I hit a website that looks "bubbly" in nature, and all prettified in those pastel-like colors, I think to myself, "This was probably done with Rails." And, lo and behold, after some digging into the site's information pages I discover this is actually true. So, I pose the question, not knowing much about Rails but enough about Django to understand how the database stuff works:
Does RoR have any display-specific qualities that affect how a web page looks? Or do all RoR devs naturally use the same Adobe tools to make everything look so ubiquitous?
Ruby on Rails is a server side technology, so it doesn't lend any specific quality to the user visible design. That said, it is a "trendy" technology so people who are likely to write their back-end code with RoR are likely to choose a particular "Web 2.0" style for their views.
As a Ruby on Rails developer, I can tell you that most Ruby on Rails developers are passionate about their work and we pay a lot of attention to details when building websites as much backend as front end. Its not just a trend, its a way of thinking and working.
No, it hasn't any display-specific qualities.
The theory is that RoR makes that backend stuff easier, so more time can, and apparently is, spent on the front end stuff.
Its all done with Mirrors. And CSS. :)
Rails is a very popular Web framework, it's just be coincidence that all the ones you've looked at have been rails apps.
What kind of sites have you been looking at to draw this hypothesis?
that's a funny question with a funny description :) ... bubbly!
As a madman, I develop with RoR, it's kind of rule in our area. We learn madness from the beginning, as a result of http://railsforzombies.org...
May wise men follow a wise path!
Short Answer: NO
However...
As a Rails developer I can say that due to the Agile nature of Rails and the speed in which you can develop web applications with Rails I do find myself having more time freed up on a project to spend polishing the user interface. I believe this may be a reason you often see more polished looking Rails sites.
So in my mind I believe your choice of framework can have a direct correlation to the end product that is produced!
Rails does add some stuff to the front end. Like to every html form, it will add a hidden input element authenticity_token.
You can also tell because rails URLs and form actions will never end with suffixes like .aspx or .php or .html or .jsp, and they won't usually append ?query=book&encoding=utf8 like you see on google. And they won't usually have superlong crufties like you see on amazon (eg http://www.amazon.com/Agile-Web-Development-Rails-Ruby/dp/1934356549/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1297922135&sr=8-1). Instead Rails prefers simple routing URLs. If amazon were written in rails, you might instead expect amazon.com/books/Agile-Web-Development-Rails-Ruby
So there are ways to spot a Rails app. I expect other web frameworks, especially the ones that emulate rails, would duplicate some or all of these features, so this isn't a sure-fire method, but it helps.

Implementing globalization in Rails

While I have experience developing Rails apps in English, I am a blank slate when it comes to handling globalization, so please don't shoot me in the head if my question 'doesn't make sense' :)
I have been asked to add multi language feature to a part of a Rails app that I am working on. Initially its only going to be 2 languages, French and German. The content that will be translated (which is in English now) is rendered using partials at the moment hence I am getting a bit inclined on creating partials with different languages and then based on the users language selection call the relevant partial - Would you recommend this approach?
Although it seems a heavy weight solution for this particular purpose, but I am also looking at the Rails Globalize plugin. This seems to appeal if I look at the long term gains, something like what if later I am asked to translate the entire app.
Any insights on what would be a proper structured approach to handle globalization in Rails?
Many Thanks
Have you had a look at the i18n (internationalization) API that is in Rails itself as of 2.2? It makes it easy to store your language translation files as .yml files, so a fr.yml and a de.yml or whatever. It also steps through different approaches of making languages accessible via browser prefs, or URLs, subdomains, etc. In your HTML template files you use symbols to specify the keys for the string you've translated. At least in my basic usage and testing, it was very easy to work with.
I preffer using translator instead of Rail's i18n, since the former handles "scoping of translation" automatically. I recommend you give it a look.
This is a great article on how to use Ruby's GetText to localise you Rails App.

Ruby on rails internationalization for Spanish

I'm creating a fast application with ruby on rails, and after doing a lot of scaffolding and validation I'm very happy with some of the features that are embeded in RoR... but I live in Mexico and all my users would love the application to be in Spanish of course. So, I noticed theres a lot of functions that write actual text in English for example time_ago_in_words and all the errors produced by the scaffolding and validation.
Before actually doing those things on my own (like I would in php for example) I wanted to know if theres some kind of language file I could edit (or even download one in Spanish). After all, the books I'm reading and the tutorials (and webcast) I'm following to learn this new framework are all in English (and fail to include this problem).
Here you can find a nice sample app which demonstrates some basics of i18n (internationalization features) in Rails.
This guide contains the most recent work on internationalization. A pretty decent reference:
http://guides.rails.info/i18n.html

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