Under Community Review

"Copy to localized components" functionality

Whenever I update the parent component with some content, I want to have an option to update localized components in child publications with same content (or part of it) in child publications.

For example, I add an image to the parent component, with "Copy to localized components" functionality on one click I will update all child components (or some selected) with the same change.

By the current implementation, I need to open manually each of the localized components and know what needs to be changed and do the update by hand, which can be time-consuming when there are over 10+ languages (localizations).

Parents
  • Hi Marko,

    Thanks for your suggestion.

    In the example you give, an image is added to the parent component and this change should be applied to the localized items. I'm wondering how, in general, one would indicate which changes should be applied to the child items? I could imagine, for example, that on saving a change the user is presented with a prompt asking whether they would like to propagate the change (delta) to the item's localized children. Is this the kind of functionality you are looking for?

    Having identified what changes we want to apply, and to which items, perhaps the bigger challenge is determining how the localized content should be modified. In the case where the image (say a multimedia component link) is inserted into a rich text field, is there a requirement that the image is inserted in the correct location in a possibly translated language? Perhaps more realistic would be to replace the entire content of any modified fields with the value from the parent item. This would mean the text in these fields would need to be re-translated (which I think is reasonable). However, if we replace the translated text, it would no longer be available for reference.

    Another complication is that, due to embedded schemas, the content structure in a localized item could, at least in theory, be very different to the structure in the parent item (i.e., fields may appear in one item, parent or child, that are not present in the other).

    As you can see, automatically applying changes to localized items in a generic way is a big challenge.

    A few simpler things we could explore are, flagging/marking localized items in some way when the parent item was modified (so that users are aware there are potential changes in the parent that the items are missing in the child), making it easier to navigate between and make manual changes to localized items, automatically unlocalizing and re-localizing selected items so that they are synchronized with the parent (but then of course these items will need to be fully re-translated).

Comment
  • Hi Marko,

    Thanks for your suggestion.

    In the example you give, an image is added to the parent component and this change should be applied to the localized items. I'm wondering how, in general, one would indicate which changes should be applied to the child items? I could imagine, for example, that on saving a change the user is presented with a prompt asking whether they would like to propagate the change (delta) to the item's localized children. Is this the kind of functionality you are looking for?

    Having identified what changes we want to apply, and to which items, perhaps the bigger challenge is determining how the localized content should be modified. In the case where the image (say a multimedia component link) is inserted into a rich text field, is there a requirement that the image is inserted in the correct location in a possibly translated language? Perhaps more realistic would be to replace the entire content of any modified fields with the value from the parent item. This would mean the text in these fields would need to be re-translated (which I think is reasonable). However, if we replace the translated text, it would no longer be available for reference.

    Another complication is that, due to embedded schemas, the content structure in a localized item could, at least in theory, be very different to the structure in the parent item (i.e., fields may appear in one item, parent or child, that are not present in the other).

    As you can see, automatically applying changes to localized items in a generic way is a big challenge.

    A few simpler things we could explore are, flagging/marking localized items in some way when the parent item was modified (so that users are aware there are potential changes in the parent that the items are missing in the child), making it easier to navigate between and make manual changes to localized items, automatically unlocalizing and re-localizing selected items so that they are synchronized with the parent (but then of course these items will need to be fully re-translated).

Children
  • Hi Nick,

    Yes, indeed. My idea was to have a prompt where editors can choose what of the updated content can be applied to which localized components. You are right to point to all the edge cases and I agree, there are quite a few. My idea was mainly focused on giving editors the option to semiautomatically or automatically update child components because they have to do it by hand. Every solution that promotes this is really useful. Since we are moving to autogenerating content, auto-tagging content, this manual management in the blueprint should also be explored.