language filesets using language tags and region sub-tags, eg: es-ES

I maintain the current spanish language pack and make it identical to the english one.

However I am in spain, and use castillian spanish (along with kg and 31/12/2014 as date format) so would prefer to develop this as such...I have been trying out es-ES as the file and directory names and have found no problems yet.

Maybe spanish is the most prominent example of the large differences between communities (spain, mexico, south america) but portuguese (portugal/brazil) has also many differences.

I would have thought that all language packs should be developed using this nomenclature, in line with other multilanguage projects and to ease the path to Zen Cart world domination?

Comments, potential problems?

torvista:

... Maybe spanish is the most prominent example of the large differences between communities (spain, mexico, south america) but portuguese (portugal/brazil) has also many differences. ...
That "large" difference also applies to English: British vs. American. It's an interesting notion that you've put out that could provide an easy method to identify the regional language differences (and associated packs). Additional benefits are that

• a store owner, when installing a language pack, would "know" what they're getting into, i.e. whether this Spanish language pack will work for them directly or whether they'll need to do some fiddling.
• a store would be able to easily "host" multiple regions for a given language, e.g. both Castilian and Mexican Spanish and/or both British and American English.

a store would be able to easily "host" multiple regions for a given language, e.g. both Castilian and Mexican Spanish and/or both British and American English
Not so sure about that at the moment as the code admitted by the admin page is currently only two chars, i.e. "es" or "en". i.e. the email templates are under the "es" directory.
So, some changes would be required to allow the use of parallel language sub-regions.

IMHO the language pack issue is neglected, fragmented and only exists down to individual efforts.
Almost every mod (I refuse to use the misleading term "plugin") I have implemented has required work to make it multiple-language compliant.

I think Zen Cart needs to offer/implement a modern translation framework in-house as per other open source projects to get its due respect as a front-runner in its field.

Although it may seem like something to only have available for 2.0 alpha...there's still a long time to go for 1.x.