Multilingual Content Management Systems? 43
Azraael asks: "I need to make a website for a small business. The website must be available in several different languages and allow for easy switching between the different versions (with little flags in each page that has multiple versions, or some scheme of the sort). User logins are not required. I was thinking of using a CMS to accomplish this in an efficient and easily extensible (more languages, more pages, etc) way. What would be the best option? I've tried Wordpress but it seems to lack multilingual support of the type I described, while having too much of a weblog feel. Mambo with Mambel seems spotty at best. Has anyone on Slashdot done this before?"
Just write it? (Score:2, Interesting)
Um, why don't you just write it? Do you not have the hour or two it would take to write and debug a simple, CMS based website? I mean, WordPress? Come on!
Of course, it might just be my perception that it only takes an hour or two... you know what happens to time when you code, even when it's just web design.
Anywho, you could always just use a wiki without the whole user-added content stuff if you're really lazy.
Re:Just write it? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Spending an hour or two" writing a CMS is not going to result in a very good CMS. Will it have a GUI for updating pages? Does it handle caching well? What about granular permissions, where somebody in one department can edit their subsection but not another subsection? And so on... there are a lot of little things that you forget about when saying "it'll only take a few hours" that mature CMSs do that your quick hack won't.
"Just" web design is pretty difficult. You have to cope with severe deficiencies in multiple browsers, memorise weird, counter-intuitive hacks to get things working in Internet Explorer, code three different ways depending on what features are available, remember to avoid some parts of the specification because they are unreliable, and remember to do the complete opposite of what the specification says in other instances because nobody bothers reading it, and so on.
I know it's trendy to think of web developers as lesser beings than "real" programmers, but we've got to put up with a hell of a lot of crap. Jeremy Zawodny (the Yahoo/MySQL guy) blogged about this: Respect for Web Developers [zawodny.com] - read the comments for a bit of insight.
plone.org (Score:3, Informative)
Re:plone.org (Score:4, Informative)
Lenya supports mutiple languages (Score:4, Informative)
Have you checked out MediaWiki? (Score:4, Informative)
This should let you do your text in whatever language you want, although you might find yourself wanting to tweak the style sheet.
Don't use flags to indicate language (Score:5, Informative)
A tangent, I know, but you shouldn't use flags to denote languages. To use the most obvious example, which flag are you going to use for English? The USA flag? Congratulations, you've pissed off all the Brits. The Union Jack? Congratulations, most Americans won't even recognise it, not to mention the fact that's the flag for the UK (it's not the English flag). What about the Canadians? And the Australians?
Jukka Korpela has written an informative article about this. [cs.tut.fi]
Re:Don't use flags to indicate language (Score:3, Informative)
If, however, the flags represent mere copies of the same site in different languages I think it's less of an issue. Americans, Australians, etc still speak English. French-Canadians, French(wo)man, Nuemeans (spelling??) still speak French...
Re:Don't use flags to indicate language (Score:2)
You have that backwards.
No, that's when using flags is appropriate. Flags denote nations. If you are trying to symbolise different nations, then flags are fine.
That's the point. They all speak English, but most of them won't recognise the
Re:Don't use flags to indicate language (Score:2)
Re:Don't use flags to indicate language (Score:1)
For example, Chinese is actually broken into multiple dialects, some of which have different technical requirements, and some of which have serious political baggage associated with them.
Go back and read the article - it's actually quite informative.
Re:Don't use flags to indicate language (Score:2)
There are, however, loads of languages which have no identifiable flag. But until you start implementing localizations to Marathi, or Hmong or Yakima, flags do work. I'm skeptical that anyone
Re:Don't use flags to indicate language (Score:5, Insightful)
If, however, the flags represent mere copies of the same site in different languages I think it's less of an issue. Americans, Australians, etc still speak English. French-Canadians, French(wo)man, Nuemeans (spelling??) still speak French...
The English example isn't a good one: use the US flag and most everyone will know what languge you mean, though you still run the risk of alienating other non-American English speakers and the risk of further American imperialism. ;-)
A bigger issue is Chinese: do you use the PRC flag for this? Congrats, you just seriously annoyed people in Taiwan. Use the Taiwanese flag? Good job, you've just incurred the wrath of the PRC Government. Hong Kong's flag? Confusing: now you're using the flag of a "special administrative region" of the PRC, but one that speaks Cantonese: are you including Cantonese characters in your site's localization (and, by extension, using the HKSCS character set?)
The answer here is simple: don't use flags as an indicator of language. Instead use the name of the language in that language. Localizing for Finnish? Use "Suomi". Japanese? Use the kanji for nihonjo.
The only time where it is arguably OK to use flags, is when you are using them to represent the country itself: if you have separate sites for the UK and the US, you can use the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes: iTunes Music Store does this, for example.
Re:Don't use flags to indicate language (Score:1)
Re:Don't use flags to indicate language (Score:1)
To use the most obvious example, which flag are you going to use for English? The USA flag?
Excellent example. The best reason for not doing this with regards to the USA flag is that English is not the official language of the country. Using the USA flag to represent a language that isn't even recognized as the country's official language is just plain silly.
How about looking around first? (Score:5, Informative)
All packages are required to be coded in PHP, however if you want to start looking at other languages (like perl or ASP) then I suggest looking at HotScripts.com and checking out whats listed in the lists there.
Failing those, how about a google search for multi-lingual CMS packages?
Re:How about looking around first? (Score:2, Informative)
Once you've got a shortlist, then drop by opensourcecms, or the website for the actual app, and try out their demo.
--Simon
Re:How about looking around first? (Score:2)
ummmm its not free...... (Score:1)
Language syntax (Score:1)
Re:Language syntax (Score:1)
Moodle (Score:2)
Plone (Score:5, Informative)
Take a look at phpWebSite (Score:3, Informative)
Hope this helps....
Red
ezPublish (Score:3, Insightful)
Although the name may sound like it is a wimpy CMS, ezPublish is one of the most impressive CMS's around. I am currently in the process of adopting it as the base for my employer's website redesign.
Yes, it is wrote by Norwegians, but their English is superior to that of many native speakers. Also, they have an amazing model for translations and versioning (keeps the 10 most recent versions of a document by default). It also has a nifty nodular system of organizing pages.
At first, it seems a little confusing, especially when the manual starts talking about nodes and objects and IDs and whatnot, but it eventually makes sense. Once that happens, you have a great deal of creative abilities, with templates and the such. I shied away from many other CMSs because they assumed (or at least appeared to assume that) you wanted to do one certain thing, and God help you if you wanted to do something else. ezPublish really seems flexible.
Oh, and to the "CMSs only take an hour or so" group: I wrote a CMS working with one other person, and we easily put 500 man-hours into developing it, adding custom functionalities, and making it look acceptable to non-technical folks (we still don't have a graphical interface, just HTML menus and tables with a sprinkling of Javascript).
Kyle
TextPattern (Score:3, Informative)
Accept-Language (Score:3, Insightful)
Example:
Accept-Language: da, en-gb;q=0.8, en;q=0.7
would mean: "I prefer Danish, but will accept British English and other types of English."
-molo
mhh.. (Score:1)
try http://typo3.com/ [typo3.com] or better:
look at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ [cmsmatrix.org] and compare them yourself.
Plone, which was mentioned before, is worth a look too.
Re: (Score:2)
Re:mhh.. (Score:1)
Write your own (Score:2)
But this was back in 1995 when I set up website for an international company (all documents in 5 different languages, users had a set of language preferences, when a translation becomes available, it replaces the other document, etc).
All stiched together with various perl, awk, bash scripts to move Word and HTML files to the right place.
After 10 years this problem is still not solved? I cannot imagine that... Go and have a good look around, I'm sure you will find a CMS that will fit the bill.
And other
AWF ? (Score:2)
http://www.awf-cms.org/ [awf-cms.org]
It doesn't have quite as many features as some other better known apps, but it can still produce a decent site.
Drupal (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Drupal (Score:2)
However, the i18n module does have some limitations. In my case, different parts of the content are created in different languages, and later translated (or not). But in Drupal, if you visit the English version of the site you won't see the French content
Try Red Dot (Score:2, Interesting)
Unfortunately, it's neither free as in beer nor as in speech, and requires IE[0], but Red Dot [reddot.com] is what my Corporate Masters have me using on a daily basis.
I haven't had to use language support a lot, but it seems fairly solid. It does help that it's a German company that markets to Europe, the US, and others. Language support is sort of a given.
~EEE~
[0] I think I just described the Trifecta of Evil for Slashdot. :(
Re:Try Red Dot (Score:1)
xaraya (Score:4, Interesting)
why a CMS, and can you take some shortcuts (Score:2)
I created a template system where each page was passed a parameter, and the template would load plain-jane html from an appropriate file. This approach allowed us to create ftp accounts for different in-country managers. They could ftp in to add and edit their own versions of pages, and, most importantly for the webmasters, could not screw with the t
mFusion (Score:1)
I spent the better part of a month going through the laundry list of CMS solutions at the very handy OpenSourceCMS [opensourcecms.com] and was having trouble finding a clear solution. Almost by accident, I found mFusion after testing PHP-Fusion 6 [php-fusion.co.uk] which it is based on.
IMHO, mFusion seems tight and efficient at what it does and is forgiving to both the first time CMS admin *cough* as well as new
MovableType (Score:2)