I'm developing a multilingual Django website. It has two languages, English and Hebrew. I want the default language for every first-time visitor to be Hebrew, regardless of what his browser's Accept-Language is.
Of course, if he changes language to English (and thus gets the language cookie or the key in the session), it should remain at English.
I think I can program this algorithm myself, but where do I "plug it in"? How do I make my project use it?
Start by reading this: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.1/topics/i18n/#topics-i18n
Then read this: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.1/topics/i18n/internationalization/#topics-i18n-internationalization
Each RequestContext has access to three translation-specific variables:
LANGUAGES is a list of tuples in which the first element is the language code and the second is the language name (translated into the currently active locale).
LANGUAGE_CODE is the current user's preferred language, as a string. Example: en-us. (See How Django discovers language preference.)
LANGUAGE_BIDI is the current locale's direction. If True, it's a right-to-left language, e.g.: Hebrew, Arabic. If False it's a left-to-right language, e.g.: English, French, German etc.
If you don't use the RequestContext extension, you can get those values with three tags:
Is this what you're asking about?
Maybe you don't have to override anything. You can just check on the first page, (or maybe every page) if the user already has a language cookie and otherwise redirect him to the set_language redirect view. In that way you could force the language to Hebrew.
If the user decides to change back to English, he can do it very easily.