My language selector is now available for sale on snowcovered, with or without source code. These are the features:

• supports both dnn 3.0.12 and 3.0.13 (2 compiled dotnetnuke.dll's are included in the packages). Installation of the dnn modification has to be done manually (by copying the modified files to the dnn bin folder - first make a backup of the original dll of course). Automated installation will render dnn inoperable on uninstall of the skinobject
• the modification makes use of a language cookie, no session variables are used (to make it better suitable for use in web farms). Making use of cookies allows for another new feature: the cookie is read like this: request("language"). This means that the language parameter can also be passed to a page by other means then a cookie, for instance by querystring, or even by form. This makes it a lot easier to link to a specific language on your site. This might be very useful if you want to give others a direct link to a specific language version of a page on your site. Check out these links, as you can see i can link to different languageversions of the same page now:
  • http://www.apollo-software.nl/?tabname=modules&language=nl
  • http://www.apollo-software.nl/?tabname=modules&language=en
  • http://www.apollo-software.nl/?tabname=modules&language=de
• The language selector itself supports 3 different appearances. Apart from a basic selectbox, also image links and text links are supported. These links render as normal hyperlinks, not as command buttons. This means that if you put links like this on your site, search engines will be able to index all language versions of your site

some parameters are available to control the appearance of the selector:

cheers,

erik

Erik van Ballegoij, The Netherlands

Hi~:

1.When I choose the language via your dropdown lists, your module can't work at all. only i choose your link, your module works.

2.as you say your module is a new skin, does it mean your module will change the website skin to suit your module? if i want to use my skin, i have to design a new skin.

See my demo, it never change any skin, it like as pa module, can post it anywhere. anyone want to change his language just click the flag or choose the language from dropdown list in one second!

http://vevei.vicp.net/dotnetnuke

it is very cheap too, just 5 usd, please go to snowcovered

http://www.snowcovered.com/snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=166&uid=ThdKHEsDotg%3d&CatalogItemID=1527&MasterCategoryID=16&SubCategoryID=47&pagenumber=0

vevei wrote:

1.When I choose the language via your dropdown lists, your module can't work at all. only i choose your link, your module works.

You probably forgot to copy my modified dotnetnuke.dll to your bin folder, as is explained in the installation file. My skinobject uses a different method of passing a new language to the page than your module, so you can't use my skinobject with your module's modified dotnetnuke.dll

vevei wrote:

2.as you say your module is a new skin, does it mean your module will change the website skin to suit your module? if i want to use my skin, i have to design a new skin.

You got a couple of things wrong here: a skin object is different from a module, i dont offer a skin, but a skin object. So you dont need to change your skin at all, just add a reference to the skin object to your own skin and you are up and running. The sample skin that i include in the package is just that: an example of how you can add my skin object to your skin, if you call that making a new 'design', then we are talking about the same .... its just semantics ....

vevei wrote:

See my demo, it never change any skin, it like as pa module, can post it anywhere. anyone want to change his language just click the flag or choose the language from dropdown list in one second!

Your language change module only seems to work when the user is not logged on, when a user is logged on the language preferrence in the user profile seems to take precedence.

vevei wrote:

it is very cheap too, just 5 usd, please go to snowcovered

Do you offer a 3.0.13 version too? By the way, you seem to be selling 2 versions at snowcovered, it might be clearer to your audience to remove the original version ... especially if you offer a free upgrade to version 2

Anyway, there is nothing wrong with some good competition, but please get your facts straight before you engage in a product comparison. Anyway i don't think that it is up to us to compare our products, its up to the people who buy our products to do so.

cheers,

erik

Erik van Ballegoij, The Netherlands

vevei wrote:

See my demo, it never change any skin, it like as pa module, can post it anywhere. anyone want to change his language just click the flag or choose the language from dropdown list in one second! http://vevei.vicp.net/dotnetnuke it is very cheap too, just 5 usd, please go to snowcovered http://www.snowcovered.com/snowcovered2/Default.aspx?tabid=166&uid=ThdKHEsDotg%3d&CatalogItemID=1527&MasterCategoryID=16&SubCategoryID=47&pagenumber=0

Your demo doesn't seem to work. Clicking on a flag brings up an error message.

Mm

I had a cleint that purchased both and he wanted me to test it and I prefer Erik's version. I prefer skinobjects over modules , that way i can refernece them in a skin and they are everywhere I use that skin. With a module I have to add em to every page I create takes more work and i dont have full control over placement.

Erik's description looks more professional, lots of settings all documented before I buy the product I would like to know exactly what it does and this helps a lot. Vevei's one has like a few lines of SnowCovered discription not very pro looking.

Then somethign else I always let count in my decission is how active is the person selling the module. And erik has been active on this forum as well as having free modules for download and with 2 similar products I tend to go for the the developer that has been in dnn community actively the longest  or most active )

The fact that an uninstall of vevei's one killed dnn wasnt a good point either. My cleint had the first one so i havent tested the other one but the first release killed dnn in an uninstall because there was usage of a recompiled dll and this wasnt mentioned in description

nokiko wrote:

The fact that an uninstall of vevei's one killed dnn wasnt a good point either. My cleint had the first one so i havent tested the other one but the first release killed dnn in an uninstall because there was usage of a recompiled dll and this wasnt mentioned in description

In all honesty, that seems to be solved in version 2 of his language selector. I had a look at the dnn installation file, and i noticed that he is saving his module in a folder with a name that differs from the module's Friendly Name ("hohoyoo-tech - LanugateSwitch" as opposed to "hohoyoo-Tech - LanguageSwitch"). This seems to trick dnn into not unistalling dotnetnuke.dll ...

Anyway i am not all happy with the fact that it is necessary to distribute any language selector with a modification to the dnn core. I will start a thread in core framework to discuss alternatives.

cheers,

erik

Erik van Ballegoij, The Netherlands

ok then that trick will solve it

Have you cheked using a http module. I did it this way with a dnn viewstate manager so that viewstate was rewritten but no core changes were neccesary. All it needed was http module added to webconfig, and this editing i did in code behind when first running the module so nothing different then a normal PA install

maybe you could check this method

nokiko wrote:

Have you cheked using a http module. I did it this way with a dnn viewstate manager so that viewstate was rewritten but no core changes were neccesary. All it needed was http module added to webconfig, and this editing i did in code behind when first running the module so nothing different then a normal PA install maybe you could check this method

ahh, i never even considered doing that, i think i was too hung up on changing pagebase I will look into it ..... thank for the tip.

cheers,

erik

Erik van Ballegoij, The Netherlands

A new version of the language selector is now available at snowcovered. With this new version the language selector has become a module as well. So should you require a selector on just one or a few pages, you can do that now. All parameters of the skinobject are available from within the settings page of the module.

Also the number of available flags has increased considerably. All european countries, USA, canada, mexico, brasil, argentine, australia, india, china and japan. Should you require another flag, please contact me.

cheers,

erik

Erik van Ballegoij, The Netherlands

• fixed bug that showed language even when it was disabled in the portal
• fixed support for friendly url's (by using a workaround for a bug in the friendly url provider that disallows hyphens (-) to be used in url's)
• mapping of languages (eg. redirect request for en-US to nl-NL). Does not work for portal administrators
• optionally show flag for current language when dropdown menu is used
• new rendering in tables, giving more control over display. Module.css stylesheet is used to style tables, even when used as skinobject. You can turn off the usage of module.css for the skinobject, in order to override the classes in your skin
• uses caching now to save the languages that are to be displayed
• newly created flags (generated from larger images), all flags have black borders now

This version is an almost free upgrade if you bought the PA only package of version 1.5 (99% discount on snowcovered). If you bought the full version, including source, the discount is 99% untill November 11 2005, after that the discount will be 60 %. This is due to the fact that i decided to sell source code at a price of 2.5 times the price of the PA only version, which remains $9.99.

The new version was developed for DNN 3.1.1, however, testing has been done in DNN 3.0.13, and shows that this version still works on 3.0.13. In fact, our demo site at www.dnnlocalization.com/demo still runs on DNN 3.0.13, and the language selector works as expected there. Of course you still need the core modification for DNN up until DNN 3.1.0.

Finally some links:

• Online helpfile: http://www.apollo-software.nl/OnlineHelp/MLLanguageSelectorHelp/tabid/78/Default.aspx
• Online demo: http://www.dnnlocalization.com/Default.aspx?tabid=91
• For sale on SnowCovered.com
• Support forum: http://www.apollo-software.nl/Forum/tabid/163/forumid/4/scope/threads/Default.aspx

Cheers,

Erik van Ballegoij, The Netherlands