I am trying out Django's i18n support and found a few issues. This only applies if you are using newforms and Django 0.96. Order of Middleware

First, the order of the middleware is important. It is defined in the documentation, but I missed it the first time around. You have to put the localeMiddleware after SessionMiddleware:

MIDDLEWARE_CLASSES = ( 'django.contrib.sessions.middleware.SessionMiddleware', 'django.middleware.locale.LocaleMiddleware', 'django.middleware.common.CommonMiddleware', )

Newforms label

There is a known bug in the newforms' handling of label text in the 0.96 release. It loads the label text at load time. So if you switch language after a form is rendered, it will not re-evaluate the display text for the new language. There is a patch at ticket number 4904. Apply this patch to your newforms.util.py

Then make sure you define label text as gettext_lazy:

from django.utils.translation import gettext_lazy class MyForm(forms.Form): myfield = forms.CharField(label=gettext_lazy('translatable_text'))

Newforms Label Trailing Colon

Another little problem with newforms at 0.96. The newforms engine constructs default HTML display label from the form's field names and always append a colon to it. While in the development version, it first checks for a trailing punctuation mark first. If a supplied label already ends in a colon, it will not add another colon. Perhaps because of this, the current locale files have many Django labels defined, with and without the trailing colon. Kinda strange huh?