Thread

I am looking to see if EE would work as a cms for a multi lingual site.
Having read around the subject, I know the database needs to be set as utf8 (as does EE).

The question is that PHP struggles with multi byte data and so has a set of multi byte methods. Does EE take this into consideration?
The site that prompted this question is:
http://developer.loftdigital.com/blog/php-utf-8-cheatsheet

The language I need to display is mandarin chinese (simplified chinese).

The forum has a few people mentioning that they have done sites in chinese so want to make sure it has will take into account the issues highlighted in the site i mentioned above.

As long as the server is setup correctly to handle UTF-8 data, then EE can handle its end appropriately.  We can’t offer support for configuring PHP appropriately.

Just look at the language packs and you’ll know that if EE could not handle those character sets then those language packs wouldn’t exist.

We also have a multi-lingual Showcase.

What specifically on the server would need configuring? are you referring to PHP or something else… e.g. apache?

You’ll need to ensure that the entire environment is UTF-8 friendly.  This is something that an experienced server administrator should be able to assist you with.

For the record, I’ve built a few UTF-8-requiring sites in EE. One had eleven languages, of which *five* had non-Latin character sets (and all of them had *different* non-Latin character sets!) EE performed beautifully, *despite* a real nightmare of a database migration at one point mid-development (the host we were migrating FROM didn’t have its db configured properly, so there was a mess of misencoded characters that had to be fixed in the import.)

Excellent, thanks for letting me know Lisa & Adrienne.

One question, is it possible to switch between language packs? on a per user basis?

Yes, you can set your language in “My Account” in the CP or in the front-end control panel area.