language and timestamp

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

I have a couple of newbie questions.

When a user changes the language preference to French does that mean the forum will change to all French or that the user can use the French accents etc in replies?

Timestamp - where is this captured from? From the server where the JForum is installed?

I have a bilingual English/French website that I'm using JForum for the community forum. What I would like is the French users to be able to view everything in French - buttons, top menu etc. Is this possible?

My users are all over the world, the server is in London, UK and I'm in Canada. Is there a way to have the timestamp detect where the user is located and use that timezone, or use the local computer setting time?


[originally posted on jforum.net by michela66]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Re: Language

The language option only applies to the jForum code generated text. E.g., Submit, post reply, and the like.

Posts in english will still be in english and not automatically translated. Also, any "Titles" for Forums, Categories, and the like will be the language they were set up with.

Re: Timestamps

There is no way to easily map time to a user preference. The date conversions happen in too many different places.

However, there is a way to make them more "internationally" friendly... You can use the dateTime.format configuration parameter to define a different format. For my global users, I use the format of:

dd MMM yy HH\:mm zzz

This displays like "06 Nov 08 13:15 EST" which lets people easily know the time. (Ok the French may complain that Nov is English...just remind them that the English speaking part of the world arranged it so they wouldn't have to speak German....Sorry... couldn't resist the ugly American joke here.. please forgive me.)

FYI - The full details are:

The timestamps are stored in the DB in a "neutral" format. However, when Java converts them from this to a text format, it uses the default JVM locale setting for a timezone. This can be changed with some webapp server start up settings... but generally defaults to the OS timezone (i.e. what the server settings are.)
[originally posted on jforum.net by monroe]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Thanks!
I'm having a problem then with the French. When I change my language preference from English to French, nothing changes. If I change to German it works. I'm not sure why the French is not working and the German is?


[originally posted on jforum.net by michela66]

[Migrated From Jforum.net]

Hmm, there seems to be no french translation properties file distributed with 2.1.8. I seem to remember that some settings changed that required translations to be configured.

Anyway, since translations are supported by the user community, I did a quick search of the forum and found:

https://coderanch.com/t/577676 #17384

This should get the french option working.
[originally posted on jforum.net by monroe]