The auto-publishing of translations

[krieghan]

In #553, #511, and finally a7b0099, a decision seems to have been made that it is reasonable to assume that the publish state of a translation should be the same as the publish state of the page that the translation is for - that is to say, if a page is in draft and a translation is added, it should be in draft, and likewise if a page is already published and a translation is added, it should be automatically published.

I'm wondering if this guiding assumption is reasonable. From my (admittedly naive) perspective, it seems as if a translation should be set to draft when it is added, and published manually, whether its root page is live or in draft. Is there something I'm missing?

[zerolab]

Hey @krieghan,

This is one of the more common patterns, and is something our projects and clients need.
In lots of cases, you get the translated version, if it exists, or the original language. This ensures continuity.

e.g if you have two pages, Page B a child of and linking to Page A, both published. You go and translate Page B, but not A. This would carry over the tree setup, but you only translate B. What happens with the reference to A? Should it 404, should it show the original?

tl;dr - we don't yet cater for all possible use cases. It should be fine to add a new setting that would control whether new translations should stay as draft, be always published, or follow the source page. Happy to review a PR for it

[stevejalim]

@zerolab We're in the use-case of needing to not publish the new locale's page until the translations have landed, too.

I'm going to see if I can address this with a Signal handler, or failing that a fork of wagtail-localize with a new setting WAGTAIL_LOCALIZE_IMMEDIATELY_PUBLISH_NEW_TRANSLATED_PAGES (or perhaps something slightly less verbose!)

[krieghan]

My understanding is that there's a setting WAGTAILLOCALIZE_SYNC_LIVE_STATUS_ON_TRANSLATE. Try setting it to False.

[thibaudcolas]

Just my two cents as a very casual wagtail-localize user for guide.wagtail.org – I’ve also found this very surprising. In my mind if there’s a tradeoff here I’d have expected the default to be what scores the best on the principle of least astonishment (not sure if that’s "404" or "redirect to original").

Additionally form an accessibility perspective, having a translated page go live with the source language text will be problematic, as it means the page’s lang attribute will mismatch with the content (a failure of WCAG SC 3.1.1 Language of Page).

[zerolab]

We did make this configurable via WAGTAILLOCALIZE_SYNC_LIVE_STATUS_ON_TRANSLATE:

wagtail-localize/wagtail_localize/operations.py

Lines 82 to 86 in caf14b8

	if getattr(settings, "WAGTAILLOCALIZE_SYNC_LIVE_STATUS_ON_TRANSLATE", True):
	publish = getattr(instance, "live", True)
	else:
	# If the model can't be saved as a draft, then we have to publish it
	publish = not isinstance(instance, DraftStateMixin)

in https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail-localize/releases/tag/v1.4

It does sound that it may need to default to False. Feel free to submit a PR. It will require a breaking changes note in the changelog/release notes.

[stevejalim]

My reply to @krieghan got eaten somewhere, but yeah setting WAGTAILLOCALIZE_SYNC_LIVE_STATUS_ON_TRANSLATE to True gave me the desired behaviour. Thank you for the pointer @krieghan!

As for making it a default, I'm +1 on that.