Proposal: load translations from settings.TEMPLATE_DIRS

[Joost Cassee]

Template paths from settings.TEMPLATE_DIRS are not always (often not?) located within the Python project directory. These directories contain site-wide templates that may contain i18n strings that should be translated. It makes sense to locate the message catalogs for these string with the templates. I propose the following additional convention for translations:

• Look for a locale directory in every path in settings.TEMPLATE_DIRS. If Django finds a translation, the translation will be installed.

This set-up is already possible by setting settings.LOCALE_PATHS, but this ticket is about proposing a new convention for templates.

If this ticket is accepted I am willing to do the patch.

[Joost Cassee]

As a reference, automatically getting translations from template directories requires the following in settings:

LOCALE_PATHS = []
for path in TEMPLATE_DIRS:
    LOCALE_PATHS.append(path + '/locale')
LOCALE_PATHS = tuple(LOCALE_PATHS)

(The conversion to a tuple is necessary to avoid an error in compile_messages.)

[Malcolm Tredinnick]

We should fix that requirement to convert to a tuple. Would you mind to open a ticket for that? It's not a very nice requirements.

The proposal itself looks reasonable. It's something for after 1.0, however.

[(none)]

Milestone post-1.0 deleted

[Ramiro Morales]

I'm not convinced standalone templates with associated translations are a common enough deployment scenario to justify adding even another path setting to the list of locations translations will be searched for at runtime.

Isn't enough that this requirement can be solved by using the Python code snippet described in comment:1 in the settings module of projects needing something like this?

[Joost Cassee]

Replying to ramiro:

I'm not convinced standalone templates with associated translations are a common enough deployment scenario to justify adding even another path setting to the list of locations translations will be searched for at runtime.

I usually bundle translation files with templates in private projects. If this is not a common practice, let's close this ticket.