As I do have a large amount of international visitors I’m thinking of creating a multilingual weblog. What would be the best approach?

1. Just setting up a separte English weblog - so you would have a Dutch and English weblog

or

2. Adding a field “english” and having the translation per entry.

I would prefer the 2nd option as that would make my entries easier to manage, but is it somehow possible to have only the english fields displayed or only the dutch fields (with some cookie or something..)?

Michiel, have a look at this thread from a while ago that handled multiple languages on a site.
I tried Sue’s suggestion (using url segments combined with a weblog that has custom fields with an ” _en” or “_de” extension to indicate language) and it works flawlessly.
It’s a long thread so you’re in for a good read

One method I just thought of:

If you offer more than one Language Pack, then users can select which Language Pack to use under My Account > Localization Settings (or through their public profile section).

If the user is logged in, then that information would be accessible via PHP.  So, you could do something like this:

Thanks guys…
@e-man, yup.. long thread

Chris Curtis - 15 June 2005 04:43 PM

One method I just thought of:

If you offer more than one Language Pack, then users can select which Language Pack to use under My Account > Localization Settings (or through their public profile section).

Great idea, Chris! That would work well.

Chris Curtis - 15 June 2005 04:43 PM

One method I just thought of:

If you offer more than one Language Pack, then users can select which Language Pack to use under My Account > Localization Settings (or through their public profile section).

If the user is logged in, then that information would be accessible via PHP.  So, you could do something like this:

{exp:weblog:entries weblog="yourweblog" ...... }

  ....

  <?php
    global $SESS;

    $language = $SESS->userdata['language'];

    if ($language == "english")
    {
    ?>
{english_field}

[...]

{/exp:weblog:entries}

Thanks Chris for this hint.

To make the language change easier would it be possible to change the userdata[‘language’] value with one click?
I thought of a simple “EN”, “FR”, “DE” link on the index page that changes the userdata[‘language’] to “French”, “German”, etc.

Would that be possible? If yes, how should that be coded?

You would have to use PHP and a query to update their value in the database for their user.

Thanks for your fast answer Chris,

Chris Curtis - 30 July 2005 10:14 AM

You would have to use PHP and a query to update their value in the database for their user.

Well, that’s what I guessed.
As I’m a PHP Newbie I don’t know how to code that.
I would appreciate if anyone could drop some useful code lines on that.