Hi
I am evaluating whether to recommend EE for re-development of the web site belonging to our international non-profit organisation.  We have two key requirements:

1. the site needs to multilingual.  So each page (including menus) will be available in several languages

2. we will have a contact directory on the site, containing contact details for hundreds of our locations around the world.  At this stage it is envisaged that the data for this directory will be stored in a separate, custom designed MySQL database.

Basically, my question is, can EE handle this?—assuming of course that professional PHP programmers will be developing the site.

In relation to multilingual, I have found the following threads. 

this thread and
this one

Can anyone share any other experiences or point me to other examples of multingal sites?

In relation to the contact directory, does it sound feasible to build our site in EE, but to pull data (content) for the contact directory pages from a separate MySQL DB?

Thanks

If at all possible, put your contact database in the same MySQL database. You’ll be able to work directly with your additional tables.

There are lots of multilingual sites, I can’t recallt he URLs of all of them.  You’ve done a search which is what I would have done. =)

As far as the contact directly - why put it into a separate db? You could use EE to manage it really easily using a weblog with custom fields…..