Symphony.

Could I get a heads up on other peoples approaches to Multi Language sites?

Looking at a way to allow easy creation of pages with 2 language entries for page titles and content?

At Present I have a section which has both Languages and entries for Navigation page titles and content strings are contained here! But then the new section entires need to be enabled in the language datasource in order to become active and then in order for the new strings to appear they would need to alter all DS that have the language strings included.

Would much prefer it if there was a way to have a drop down of each language when you edit an entry and submit the content for either language there.. But this ads the issue of not being able to alter page titles for languages based on navigation templates.. Trying to see this from a users perspective and at present it’s not a smooth ride for them when it comes to multi-lingual control of the site without a techies intervention at some point.

thoughts?

I would also like to see others input on this.

I really like Symphonys ideas and the use of XSLT as the template language, which I’m quite comfortable with.

But what approaches have been used for multilingual sites? Are there good solutions to this?

Ideally I’d like the navigation/menu structure and language strings for navigation items to be configurable in the admin section. And there should not necessarily be a 1-to-1 mapping of navigation items between each language — some languages may have an “incomplete” site structure compared to the main language.

I don’t think editing all languages for a content item needs to be done on one page. There’s often different people responsible for the different language contents. And for example a news section may have independent news items. I’d rather group all content in language sections somehow. So you’ll navigate the english content when that’s what you’re editing.

I’ve read through a lot of forum posts, many not ending in any conclusion / resolve to this. Other suggesting and talking about the language field, language redirect and similar extensions, which I’ve looked at. But I’m interested in hearing about complete solutions and other people’s thoughts on this.

This field type should help with multi-language site content…

I don’t think editing all languages for a content item needs to be done on one page. There’s often different people responsible for the different language contents.

The authors could go in and edit the entry to add languages?

I’ve not done a multi-lingual site yet, but I am interested also in others opinions on the subject, there are posts on this forum tackling the subject, just have a good look through as well.

Useful extensions are language redirect, multilingual field for sections that has same content in all languages, and language field if content could be different depending of the language because you can use this field to filter entries by language.

I have in my to do list to publish a generic multilingual ensamble to be used as start point for multilingual sites, so I’m looking for the best solution that suits the widest range of cases.

Colud be interesting to read in this post about different aproaches to this kind of sites to take them under consideration.

Ideally I’d like the navigation/menu structure and language strings for navigation items to be configurable in the admin section. And there should not necessarily be a 1-to-1 mapping of navigation items between each language — some languages may have an “incomplete” site structure compared to the main language.

@froded: You can do it createing a root page for any language and replicate the site structure under each root page.

/en
/en/home/
/en/about/
/en/contact

/es
/es/inicio
/es/quienes-somos

I’ve done some multilingual sites with this solution, it’s more flexible because you can work with languages as a different sites but for a large site could be complex to maintenance because the large number of pages.

Thanks for the tip about the multilingual field, I had missed that.

It seems a combination of using the multilingual field for static page content sections, and the language field for news posts and similar content sections is the best fit for me.

@guillem_l: I’m leaning towards a more fixed site structure using pages, but I’m not quite sure how your suggestion would work with the language redirect extension since it removes the language code from the URL Symphony parses.

The page field extension also looks promising for my static page content.

I’m going to try set up the site structure using pages, then a section for static content using the page field and multilingual field extensions. And then a News section with a language field, which a page with ‘news’ handle fetches correct content for using a data source filtering by $url-language provided by the language redirect extension.

Last time I did a multi-lingual site was some time ago, and I used Textpattern’s Multi-Lingual Publishing Pack which was pretty powerful. I think Symphony could really benefit from an extension like that.

http://symphony-cms.com/discuss/thread/40196/#position-4

Hi Guillem_I, did you manage to configure a multi lingual ensemble at all?

@moonoo2: Nope, still in my to do list :-(

Cool man, so much has happened since this post was created I guess back to drawing board must’ve been said a fair few times eh!

Here’s a summary of how I built my multi-lingual site with Symphony, maybe it will be of some relevance to you.