598029 - Fix "timesince" filter for locales unknown to Django

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Input :: General, defect, P3)

Description

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

If Django does not know a locale (like fy-NL), the "timesince" filter just shows English on our otherwise localized site. Need to figure out a way to fix this. Either by avoiding the timesince filter altogether and running something of our own (thus making it localizable) or some other method I haven't thought about yet.

Comment 1

[Dave Dash [:davedash, :dd] (assign all bugs to mbrandt)]

When you import the timesince filter as a helper, can't you monkeypatch something like:

defaultfilters._ = uggetext

that should force it to use our uggettext from tower, rather than django...

Comment 2

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

Hm, but that still wouldn't make the strings in "1 week, 4 days ago" show up in our translation file...?

Comment 3

[Dave Dash [:davedash, :dd] (assign all bugs to mbrandt)]

Hrm, I suppose we can't just add them in somehow?

Comment 4

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

Chowse also suggested to reduce the complexity of the timesince display to just the largest number ("1 week" as opposed to "1 week, 3 days", and "3 hours" as opposed to "3 hours 12 minutes"). That should greatly reduce the complexity here and make it easily localizable.

Chris: Should we go as high as months for the biggest possible interval, or do you want to keep weeks, which would result in displays like "73 weeks ago" when digging back in time?

Comment 5

[Chris Howse [:chowse]]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Chris: Should we go as high as months for the biggest possible interval, or do
> you want to keep weeks, which would result in displays like "73 weeks ago" when
> digging back in time?

Given that feedback seems to have a shelf life of one beta cycle (~30 days), I don't think there's much need to provide more than one-day intervals.

I'm also partial to Twitter's approach: after a few days, give an absolute date instead of a relative timestamp. For example, if a comment is more than a week old, just use something like "01 Nov".

Comment 6

[Fred Wenzel [:wenzel]]

Code and test: http://github.com/fwenzel/reporter/commit/0aa0181

The limits are now:

< 1 minute: "just now"
minutes, hours, and days as expected
> 7 days: full localized date, as in: "Aug 28, 2010".