What should the language flags in Site Settings actually do?

[idumlupinar]

Hi everyone,

A while ago I opened #7415 because I expected the whole Site Settings screen to switch language when I clicked one of the language flags.

The flags don't change the Persona Bar UI language at all. Clicking one just re-renders the tabs and passes a different cultureCode to the API. The UI text comes from resx files loaded once when the Persona Bar opens, using the user's UI culture. That's a separate concept, controlled by "Users May Choose Interface Language".

So the flags really pick which language's settings you're editing. On the server, these are stored per language:

• Site name, description, keywords, footer text, logo, icon set
• Default pages (Home, Login, Register, 404, Terms, Privacy, etc.), the login/logout/registration redirects and page header tags
• Search synonyms and ignore words
• Profile property localization

These don't depend on the language at all:

• Messaging
• Profile settings
• URL mapping and aliases
• Language settings
• "More" settings
• Basic search
• Time zone
• Favicon

Why I think it's confusing

• When in use the frontend Language skin object redirects to a localized URL, so the whole page switches language. The Site Settings flags look the same but behave completely differently.
• Several tabs (Messaging, Privacy, More) reload when you click a flag but don't send the language, so they look per-language even though they aren't.
• Privacy is mixed: only the cookie "more info" link is saved per language, and it's saved against the culture that was loaded initially, not necessarily the flag you selected.
• There's no label or tooltip explaining what the flags are for. Each flag's tooltip is just the language name.

Questions

1. Is it right that the flags are only meant to switch which language's settings you're editing, not to localize the Site Settings UI?
2. If so, would it help to:
   • add a short label or tooltip like "Editing settings for: Deutsch (Deutschland)",
   • visually mark which fields or tabs are per-language,
   • stop tabs that don't depend on language from reloading when the flag changes, and
   • fix the Privacy cookie link so it's saved for the selected language?

3. Or does anyone think the flags should also switch the UI language, like the frontend selector does? - Testing this on https://github.com/idumlupinar/Dnn.Platform/tree/bugfix-7415 branch.

I'm happy to put together a PR for whichever direction makes sense, but I'd rather agree on the intended behavior first so #7415 can be closed or reworded properly.

Thanks!

[valadas]

Historically DNN used CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture independently. One (current culture I think) represented the site/module target language (what visitors would see when using that language).

The other (currentUICulture) represented the user interface language targeting the editing user. It used to default to the user profile preferred culture and "Users may chose interface language" would override this.

This made sense to me, I may need to edit a site in greek and I don't speak greek, so I need to see the controls in english but the content in greek.

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At some point in DNN history, a decision was made to keep both CurrentCulture and CurrentUiCulture always in sync. This was pre-github days I think and there used to be a long Jira issue about it. I can't remember the reasoning about this but was always flabbergasted that this change made it into DNN.

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Now I believe we have some areas where those values are in sync and other areas where it is not. I have tried to look into this in more details in the past and got into massive headaches and hesitations. Last time it was also pre-AI, some maybe nowadays this could be tackled somehow easier.

If you do have the time to dig into this and to put a PR together for any enhancements in this area, I would be glad to try and review/test. This may have to be something for at least a minor release with more eyes than just my own on testing, but we have a couple of multilingual people we can try to get help on testing whatever solution is proposed.