Mutli store setup to use another store other than default as the default language for category and product translation

Question

We have a multi store setup with our default store set to be in English.

We have a Dutch website (.nl) which inherits all of the English products and categories but we have altered the names, descriptions and category names to be in Dutch at the store level.

We are now setting up a parallel store to the .nl site for the Belgium domain (.be) but we would like to use the .nl translations and overrides as that is the native language for half of the population. Is this possible?

We can change the locale to use the Dutch language pack but can't figure out if its possible to get the product and category level information to be shared.

Answer 1

Unfortunately not. Attributes are always inherited by store view > website > default hierarchy. To change that, many database queries would have to change and get even more complex.

You will either have to do manual copy & paste, use an external product management system, or implement a module that copies the values from NL to BE on save, using observers.

Update

Andreas von Studnitz did it. This free module allows to copy values from one store view to another: https://github.com/avstudnitz/StoreViewCopy It has to be triggered manually with a mass action but should be easy to extend.