[pmwiki-users] XLpage: 1st parameter?

[Patrick R. Michaud]

On Tue, Oct 03, 2006 at 12:58:21PM +0200, Mike wrote:
>    the XLpage function takes two parameters: the second specifies where the
>    translations are to come from - easily understood. But why do I need the
>    first parameter?
> 
>    If in
>    XLPage('fr','PmWikiFr.XLPage');
> 
>    I'd write instead:
>    XLPage('strangelanguage','PmWikiFr.XLPage');
> 
>    then after all PmWiki would still retrieve translation strings from
>    PmWikiFr.XLPage, i.e. translate into French, no matter what I wrote for
>    the first parameter?

The XLPage mechanism allows multiple sets of translations to be loaded,
and the first parameter is used to distinguish them.  

For example, suppose I want to have translations for both normal French
and "Canadian" French.  Rather than maintain two entirely separate sets
of pages, I could do:

    XLPage('fr', 'PmWikiFr.XLPage');
    XLPage('fr-ca', 'PmWikiFrCa.XLPage');

PmWikiFr.XLPage would contain all of the standard French translations,
while PmWikiFrCA.XLPage would only need to contain "Canada-specific"
translations -- i.e., those that are different from the ones in the
French page.

The first parameter distinguishes the two sets of translations.
In addition, a config.php script can use the $XLLangs variable
to adjust the order of translation, so if there was a group or
page where I only wanted the standard French translation, I
can set

    $XLLangs = array('fr', 'en');

and PmWiki will use only the 'fr' and 'en' translations (in that order),
no matter how many translations have been loaded with XLPage().

Hope that explains things well enough...

Pm