Snippets by foxbunny

i18n base model for translatable content

Together with my mentor, Dusty Phillips, I have developed a simple class that dynamically adds two fields to its subclasses. This is useful in cases when a single piece of content is divided into translatable and non-translatable fields, connected by a 1-to-many relationship. ## Update 2009/03/30 Since its inception, this snippet has grown into a significantly more powerful solution for translatable content (I use it myself with great joy :). The project is now hosted on github: [project page](http://github.com/foxbunny/django-i18n-model/tree/master) ## Update 2008/07/09 It is now possible to define `i18n_common_model` attribute in `class Meta` section. Here's an example: class Meta: i18n_common_model = "MyCommonModel" As you can see, it has to be a string, not the real class, and it is case-sensitive. ## Example class Article(models.Model): author = models.CharField(max_length = 40) class Admin: pass class ArticleI18N(I18NModel): title = models.CharField(max_length = 120) body = models.TextField() class Admin: pass # optionally, you can specify the base class # if it doesn't follow the naming convention: # # class Meta: # i18m_common_model = "Article" When the ArticleI18N class is created, it automatically gains two new fields. `lang` field is a CharField with choices limited to either `settings.LANGUAGES` or `django.conf.global_settings.LANGUAGES`. The other field is `i18n_common` field which is a ForeignKey to Article model. ## The conventions * call the translation model `SomeBaseModelI18N`, and the non-translation model SomeBaseModel (i.e., the translation model is called basename+"I18N") * the first convention can be overriden by specifying the base model name using the `i18n_common_model` attribute in `Meta` section of the `I18N` model * I18N model is a subclass of `I18NModel` class ## Original blog post [http://blog.papa-studio.com/2008/07/04/metaclasses-and-translations/](http://blog.papa-studio.com/2008/07/04/metaclasses-and-translations/)