Remove need to manually indicate national language for every new collection

Bloom Bloom Feature Requests
1

In a recent workshop the question was asked why the national language has to be changed from English using Settings > Languages for each new collection. Many, maybe most, users will probably use the same national language for all of their collections.

We wondered if Bloom could default to using one of the following as national language for new collections:

  • Use the language of the user’s Windows account
  • Use the language chosen for the Bloom interface
  • Use the language chosen for nataional language in the previous collection created
  • Ask for the national language in the Create Collection wizard immediately after asking for the local language
2

Hey @Bruce_Beatham thanks for this. Our current plan is to get rid of the New Collection Wizard. We’ll ask for a lot less from you, but will stop having any default L2. We will explicitly ask for it.

My sense is that trying to have anything automatic with L2 would backfire on us, support-wise. It is super common for people to create and publish books that have text in a different language than they are typing in. That is really expensive for us, staff-wise, to try to reach people and ask them to fix it. So it’s best to be explicit with language selection.

Hopefully creating new collections is a rare enough thing that it’s not a big deal to just ask the user to choose “español” or whatever each time.

Here’s our current idea, what do you think?

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In this mockup, the L2 is optional… maybe that’s not workable and would end up being the same as defaulting to English, because we do have to use some major language for things like CC licenses.

I don’t expect us to get to this until Bloom 5.7, sorry, so still at least six months off.

3

Yes, if the New Collection Wizard is replaced by these two questions, I do think things would be much easier, and it would be less-likely for people to leave the L2 set to English. We find that currently it’s easy for them to assume it’s Spanish when the interface (& setup wizard) is set to Spanish, so they don’t look into the Collection Settings to change L2 to English and just type Spanish into those fields. I like the idea of asking them to define the L2 explicitly at the time of setting up the collection.