In an earlier blog I discussed setting up Variations, Variation Labels, the Variation Source and the related hierarchy. In this blog I will discuss some limitations you should be aware of and how the variation "engine" works.
Variations, you will recall are a MOSS feature, not a WSS feature. The bottom line is that variations are limited to those aspects of MOSS that are publishing-related. In other words the collaborative aspects of MOSS, for example, team sites and their constituent subsites and lists (and libraries too, if you prefer to think of them as different from lists) do not participate in the variations feature. Sites that use the Publishing template or have the publishing feature enabled, with or without workflow, do participate in the variations feature. (See Mike Gehard’s blog on enabling publishing features for a brief discussion of this topic.)
This might seem to be a serious limitation, but if one thinks about the purpose of WSS and how MOSS builds on that it makes sense. WSS is all about collaboration. Typically collaboration items do not need to be published in multiple languages. Once the collaborative efforts have ended, at least as Microsoft sees the world, items might be published in a publishing-based site and the collaboration site deleted. It is the published items that then would be published in multiple languages.
What happens when a variation hierarchy is created for a series of variation labels? The source variation label is created as are the other variation labels. The default.aspx page of the source site will from this point forward not be directly accessible again. Rather a new page, VariationRoot.aspx is created and redirects browsers to the appropriate site based on the language settings in the browser. If, for example, fr-CA is set as the primary language and a variation label with the fr-CA "culture" was created, the browser will e redirected to that site.
As pages are produced and published, they are copied to the appropriate sites in the variation hierarchy. Recall from the earlier blog that this does not translate the content, but only copies it to the sites in the hierarchy. This is no small feat however and it ensures that the variation sites are kept in sync with the master or source site. Moreover the controls and the settings of the pages will be appropriate for the various language sites. For example a right-to left language site will be arranged in that manner and the buttons, labels and other controls on the pages will appear in the language of the site.
There’s more to discuss about variations; but that’s for another blog
