Multiple problems with the translation UI & languages dropdown for Say Their Names

[caaster]

There are multiple problems with the translation UI and user navigation (for the languages dropdown) for the Say Their Names exhibit.

The STN exhibit is the number 2 most viewed/used exhibit across all published exhibits.

The problems started occurring the week of 19 May to SUL colleague Miranda, who is working on the accessibility remediation for the STN exhibit. By the time I heard about the issues, I was heading out the door on vacation, so Miranda scheduled a meeting for today (3 June) to show me what was happening.

We had a Zoom meeting; here is the recording. Please watch the entire recording as several issues are encountered, to include:

• When adding a new feature page, all existing English feature pages automatically were replaced with Spanish
• When adding a new feature page, the pages widget stopped displaying page tiles on a main feature page (notably, in Edit mode the pages were still there as published, but they stopped displaying on the published page)
• Toggling back and forth between the different languages in the top right pulldown menu do not seem to work

This work is semi-urgent, because now some of the English pages for STN are in Spanish, and other exhibit creators are or will be imminently working on multi or dual language exhibits -- for accessibility remediation -- and it could cause a lot of confusion if these problems start happening to them too.

[taylor-steve]

Tested this some. It's an issue in Spotlight. After viewing the recording and testing I feel the critical part is this centered around clicking "Save changes" on the Curation > Feature pages dashboard page when in a translated locale.

@corylown It sure feels like the locale isn't being passed/respected in this case so it's happily changing everything in update_all_page_params/page_attributes for all pages in the default locale regardless of current locale. In which case this looks like this never worked/wasn't implemented, or am I missing some Rails magic?

@caaster if this is correct, the temporary workaround could be to only use "Save Changes" when in the default locale for:

• Curation > Feature pages
• Curation > About pages

Reminding users that the "Save Changes" button on those dashboard pages is only necessary after:

• Modifying the publishing checkbox
• Modifying the title in-place via the pencil
• Modifying the order of pages

They could still use the View/Edit/Delete links for individual pages on the translated locales for those dashboard pages.

I'm not suggesting this is something users should have to worry about, but it might allow people to keep working until this can be addressed.

[caaster]

@taylor-steve Thank you for the above suggestions. I'd like to walk through those interim options with you using screenshare so I'm sure I understand your guidance. Unless I am misunderstanding, this doesn't address the scenario where a new page must be added. This is necessary for some a11y remediation work -- where a new feature page or feature pages (or about pages) must be added to contain full transcriptions of images on feature or about pages that contain extensive text.

For an example of this, see Appendix A and Appendix B for the Ric Weiland exhibit: https://exhibits.stanford.edu/richard-weiland/feature/ric-s-story

[taylor-steve]

New pages could be added via the default locale dashboard and then translated versions could be created via Curation > Translations in the Pages tab.

[corylown]

@taylor-steve thanks for taking a look at this. I spent a little time this morning trying to understand what's going on.

I have a suspicion that the bug is that we're displaying the translated page titles/slugs on the Feature Pages and About Pages admin pages at all. I think the intent was that those pages always list the pages in the default locale (regardless of the currently selected locale) and that translation editing is intended to happen always in the Translations admin page. So maybe the fix is to change the Feature Pages and About Pages to always display the default page titles/slugs.

I'll see if I can track down when/if something changed to cause us to display the translated titles/slugs on the Feature Pages and About Pages. Or maybe this bug has always been present. Not sure yet.

I'm also now wondering if the reason the locale dropdown isn't working consistently is because the slug of the default page also gets changed along with the title if the save button is clicked on the Feature Pages and About Pages admin pages when a non-default locale is selected.

[corylown]

Okay...here's the culprit: https://github.com/projectblacklight/spotlight/blob/9418d0df09576e57df000f3576d25ed88c8bf9b9/app/models/spotlight/page.rb#L49

We (I) added this title method to fix projectblacklight/spotlight#2781 and #2132 without realizing the side effect on the admin page. I'm not sure if the fix is to change our approach to fixing those older issues or to add another method that always returns the default locale title when we need it?

    def default_locale_title
      return self[:title] if I18n.locale == I18n.default_locale
      
      self.default_locale_page[:title]
    end

which we could then use here https://github.com/projectblacklight/spotlight/blob/9418d0df09576e57df000f3576d25ed88c8bf9b9/app/views/spotlight/pages/_page.html.erb#L2 instead of title

[corylown]

It looks like the issue with the widgets not showing up is that saving the default locale pages with the translated titles caused the slugs to change from what they were when they were added to the widget. As far as the widget is concerned those pages no longer exist.

[corylown]

I created #2924 to deal with the locale picker problem separately.