I am tasked with i18n-ing our current CMS setup in Drupal. The problem that I am facing is with use of module_invoke() to place blocks within nodes.
I have managed to string translate blocks, and that is working when a block is placed in a region (block content is successfully translated) using the UI.
However, when a block is injected into a node like such:
$block = module_invoke('block', 'block', 'view', 22); print $block['content'];
It is not getting translated, or even worse, not showing at all.
I have also tried this variation using t(). e.g.:
$block = module_invoke('block', 'block', 'view', 22); print t($block['content']);
to no avail.
Generally speaking I've having a bit of trouble with blocks for i18n. Does anyone have a recommended approach for dealing with blocks in drupal with regards to translating them? I would prefer not to create different blocks for each language.
So .. After digging around in the bowels of Drupal - and much hair pulling .. I've come up with an almost decent solution.
Basically, with this function, I can extract a translated version of a block:
function render_i18n_block($block_id, $region = "hidden"){
if ($list = block_list($region)) {
foreach ($list as $key => $block) {
// $key == <i>module</i>_<i>delta</i>
$key_str = "block_".$block_id;
if ($key_str == $key){
return theme('block', $block);
}
}
}
}
Then, in my node, I simple call:
<?php echo render_i18n_block(<block_id>,<region>); ?>
There can be some issues where your blocks might not be displaying in a region (and therefore you can't pass a region into block_list). For this case, I simply created a region called "hidden" which is not rendered anywhere in my template, but can be used to call block_list.
Finally (and this is the part that I still need to find a good solution for), I discovered that block_list() in: includes/blocks/block.inc has a bit of an issue.
It appears that $theme_key is not reliably set unless block_list() is being called from the theme() function (in includes/themes.inc) .. this causes the SQL to return an empty results set. The SQL looks like this:
$result = db_query(db_rewrite_sql("SELECT DISTINCT b.* FROM {blocks} b LEFT JOIN {blocks_roles} r ON b.module = r.module AND b.delta = r.delta WHERE b.theme = '%s' AND b.status = 1 AND (r.rid IN (". db_placeholders($rids) .") OR r.rid IS NULL) ORDER BY b.region, b.weight, b.module", 'b', 'bid'), array_merge(array($theme_key), $rids));
As you can see, if theme_key is not set, then it will just return an empty result. For now I am bypassing this by simply adding:
if (!isset($theme_key)){$theme_key="<my_theme_name>";}
in modules/blocks/block.inc::block_list() around line 429 .. I still need to work out a better way to do this.