Bug 6481

There's something wrong with this snippet:


select variable,value,explanation from systempreferences where variable like '%language%';

variable	value	explanation
language	en,es-ES	Set the default language in the staff client.
opaclanguages	en,es-ES	Set the default language in the OPAC.


Koha doesn't have a way to set a default language from system. You can allow user to decide, but that gets into a cookie, not into database. And that cookie doesn't get set up upon first login for some configurations (that could be material for another bug).

So we need a way to select a default language and set it into system preferences.

The explanation of those two variable tells they set a default, but how can they claim to set a default language if 'value' holds a list of possibilities and there is no way to arrange it's order?

I would like to add a new syspref called "available_languages" and change the behaviour of this two to actually do what they claim. But on an irc chat with Magnuse and Cait we agree that it would be more cumbersome and confusing to change the way those variables work now.

So even when they will keep misleading names, it's preferable to have two new syspref to set a default languages and keep these two the way they work now: as a list of language options, and, of course, modify their descriptions.

I propose to add "preferred_language" and "preferred_opaclanguage" to systempreferences table.

Finally, I believe this affects master too, but my testing was done in a 3.4.x installation.