Fix to my Language Store framework for multi-lingual sites

In my last post, I talked about a fix to my Config Store framework for an issue which manifested itself on certain SharePoint builds, with Windows 2008 and a recent cumulative update seeming to be the trigger. Some of you may know that I produced a sister project to this one called the 'Language Store', which is designed to help build multi-lingual SharePoint sites - since this framework is built off the same underlying XML and plumbing, this solution was also affected.  So this post is just a short one to say that the fix has now been applied to the Language Store framework, and the new version is now available on Codeplex at http://splanguagestore.codeplex.com.

Problem/solution

The problem was effectively that items in the SharePoint list could no longer be edited - well, in fact they could be updated using code, but the list form .aspx pages were not showing the fields correctly so items couldn't be edited in the UI. Since it kind of defeats the point of SharePoint to have to write code to update list items (!), this was a big issue on affected builds. Interestingly some users reported working around the issue by removing/re-adding the content type from the list in the browser, but happily this is no longer necessary since the root issue has now been resolved. The problem was traced to some incorrect XML in my FieldRef elements - see the last post Fix to my Config Store framework and list provisioning tips for the full info.

General recap - the Language Store

If you're still reading, I figure some folks would welcome a reminder/intro on what the Language Store actually does - it's not about replacing SharePoint's variations functionality which is commonly used on multi-lingual sites. I noticed Spence gave it a better name in an e-mail recently where he described it as a 'term store' for multi-lingual sites - this actually captures what it does far better than my name for it. Effectively the idea is to provide a framework for the many small strings of text which are not part of authored page content which need to be translated and displayed in the appropriate language. As an example, here is a page from the BBC site where I've highlighted all the strings which may need to be translated but which don't belong to a particular page:

There are many of these in a typical multi-lingual site, and to help deal with this requirement the Language Store framework provides the following:

• SharePoint list/content type/site columns etc.
• API to retrieve items with a single line of code
• Granular caching for high-performance
• Packaged as a .wsp for simple deployment
• All source code/XML freely available

If you want to find out more, see Building multi-lingual SharePoint sites - introducing the Language Store. The solution can be downloaded from the Codeplex site at http://splanguagestore.codeplex.com.

Apologies to existing users who were affected by the issue.