Thread

Hi all, the co. I’m working at has a client site that is in 18 different languages (13 with english versions). It was originally supposed to be in 1 language and built that way, but…

It ended up being 18 sites and long story short the custom CMS was merely copied 18 (including about 13 with english versions) times… it’s now a mess. If you want to add a page to the site you have to log into each CMS and add it in. Which takes aaages.

So I keep grumbling that EE could whip this scenario into shape but I’m unsure how. I’m guessing Multiple Site Manager (which I’ve not used before).

Pages are drip fed out to all the sites so I’d like it so that if you create a page the publish page will have 18 fields to accommodate all the different languages and if say, the German one wasn’t populated it wouldn’t appear on the German site… I’m not sure really my mind aches when I think about how to do it!

The sites are all visually identical BUT would need the ability to add something unique to any of them at any time. Would they/could they share templates?

Just curious if this seems doable before I storm into my bosses office and assure him this can be done!

Many thanks!

I was interested in this post because we’ve dealt with this problem in reverse on a new company website.

The site was developed with multi-lingual capabilities and we planned to launch it in English, French & Dutch. However, as we’ve gone through the build/development process have made the decision to turn them all into separate site.

If the site is exactly the same in each language (just translated) then it’s maybe less of an issue - but we kept finding instances of this product not being available in country x or wanting to sort product with a different priority for different county markets. All minor stuff, but it built up and up to a point where we realised we weren’t saving any work by having them on the one site.

Yes having to create a new page 3 times and log into 3 separate CMS is going to be a bit of a pain - but so is working with a huge number of if statements and (in your case) 18 versions of any entry field is potentially going to get confusing (I’m thinking copy & pasting into the wrong field perhaps).

Not trying to say it’s necessarily a bad idea, just giving you the argument from the other side and lessons learnt from a current project.

Needing to add the page in for each language might not be the end of the world. It’s duplication of template/custom field stuff that is probably the main concern. I’m not sure if you can share templates/custom fields etc with MSM…[checks docs]... looks like you can : )

If I created a news section I’d like to just have to create it once and then deal with the languages in another way. So in that case it would have to be one installation of EE I reckon… still really not sure.

Thanks for your input!

Someone just pointed this out to me…

http://cwcrawley.co.uk/2010/01/multi-lingual-websites-in-expressionengine/

Which is claimed to be an improvement to this…

http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Multi_language_site_alternative/

With an uneducated glance from me it seems like it could work.

Another suggestion…

http://leevigraham.com/cms-customisation/expressionengine/lg-multi-language/