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Hi, all.  I’m fairly new to ExpressionEngine, having been experimenting with it for the past couple of months, and have some questions about a complex site setup which I’d like to get some advice on.

I’m currently rebuilding all the European websites for a single company.  Here’s how the sites are currently set up and what I need to duplicate in ExpressionEngine:

* There is a language selector companyname.eu which is the gateway to all the country-specific domains.

* Each site has its own domain e.g. companyname.co.uk, companyname.de, companyname.fr, etc.

* Some of the sites are in more than one language.  In such cases, subdomains are used for the different languages e.g. fr.companyname.be, nl.companyname.be.  Entering the domain without the subdomain - companyname.be - resolves to the subdomain specified as the default language for the country e.g. nl.companyname.be.

* The layout is the same across all sites, so templates are shared.  There are some minor differences in some cases e.g. Italian site has a slightly different footer.

* Navigation is mostly the same but can vary across sites e.g. not all sites have a blog, forums, videos, etcetera.

* Product data is shared across all sites, but not all products are available in all countries.

I’m unsure as to the best way to go about achieving all these goals. I have had some success with a single install of EE using an extension I wrote to determine the language version from the domain name.  Coupled with if/else blocks in templates, a field type called Grid Light for text translations and adding radio buttons to toggle show/hide for products on individual sites I got a reasonable facsimile of the existing functionality.  I was not convinced it was the best approach though and was also concerned that some aspects such as caching would not work doing it that way.

MSM seems to be the answer to a lot of these problems but I’m not clear on how I need to configure it.  Currently, I have the default site as the language selector with MSM used to create the country-specific sites.  This seems to satisfy the requirement to have all the templates and product data in one place rather than having to edit it across fourteen different sites.

Finally, I’d also like to use Structure if possible so I can auto-generate navigation, breadcrumbs and so on, but it doesn’t seem to want to use templates or channel data from any sites other than the one being viewed.

If anyone could steer me in the right direction I’d really appreciate it.  I’m loving the power and flexibility of ExpressionEngine, but it can be a bit bewildering as there are many ways to go about things and it’s not always clear which is the best.

Thanks for any help you can provide.

Jonathan Porter

Quite a complicated set-up but I’d use MSM for a similar set-up in combination with the path variable technique http://expressionengine.com/wiki/Multi_language_site_alternative for the sublanguages on a single domain.

Maybe you should get in touch with @Filipvds from http://ee-zoo.com , they are currently in beta-testing a multi-language add-on that works with Structure.
Another brand new option is Transcribe form EE harbor http://eeharbor.com/transcribe

Sorry for the late reply - just wanted to say thanks for responding and for the links.  I agree that MSM coupled with the technique in your first link is the way to go.  I think I unnecessarily complicated things by trying to add Structure to the mix.  Good product, but doesn’t work well with this approach, or I just haven’t found a way to make it work yet.

Thanks again!