Localising Included HTML files

Of course, in a website you want lots of HTML files, and in a multi-language website you want to provide translations for them. But how do you arrange it so that if you choose French as your locale, then the correct French HTML files are loaded?

The trick is to create a portlet definition for each HTML file you want to include. A bit tedious, I know, but how else can you do it? The portlet definitions reside in portlet.xml in the j2-portal web application, inside the WEB-INF folder. In there you will find a suitable portlet to revise and take over, such as 'Welcome to Jetspeed 2'. Just copy and duplicate this as many times as you want. It uses the Apache Portal Applications FilePortlet. Now this contains a trick suggested here, although the real mechanism is a little bit different.

You first define an init-param for the portlet thus:

<init-param>
  <name>useLanguage</name>
  <value>true</value>
</init-param>

This turns on the 'fallback' mechanism for files you specify but Jetspeed doesn't find at first. It works like this: if you specify a file /WEB-INF/view/info/about.html in your portlet-preference (see the portlet.xml file) but it's not there, and you enabled the fr locale by saying <supported-locale>fr</supported-locale>, and the current locale is French, then it will generate a fallback consisting of /WEB-INF/view/info/fr/about.html, and if that is present it will load that. The same trick works for any locale, including en.

The title and description strings have to be defined in resource bundles, but I will tackle that tomorrow.