Thread

Hi there,

I’m looking at Expression Engine to power a corporate site I will be creating.

The site will be your standard kind of corporate site, with static pages, company info etc.

The client would like the ability to create localised international versions of the site, which will then be maintained by staff from international offices. We would envisage creating the main English site, and then cloning it to set up the international versions. These would be accessed by http://www.domain.com/en/ www.domain.com/fr/ etc or maybe. The local offices would use a cloned site as their starting point and then translate / add/remove content.

We would need admin permissions to allow the international offices to edit only their own sites.
The sites would need to share a common registered user-base.

However on the main English version we will need to create a few custom database driven areas. For example a data-sheet downloads section. Visitors will be able to select from several drop-down boxes and be returned a list of PDF data-sheets for download. We need to offer data-sheets in several languages - how can we offer the same downloads section across each web-site but translated?

Can the kinds of things I am looking for be easily achieved with Expression Engine?

Also does EE support any kind of internationalisation translations/localisation?

It sounds like EE can handle it without problem- the difficulty will be deciding how to set it up.  I’d read over this entry and this one for two approaches.

Now- that said…  I think it’s going to depend on how you want it to work.  I’d be tempted to use a Multi-site Manager Approach in some instances.  It just depends.  If in general, you’ll have a single entry that will have multiple translations, I’d go with one of the wiki approaches and a field for each translation.  HOWEVER, it rather sounds like that’s not what you want to do- if you want the content to be totally independent- and clone the template structure, look, organization, but have separate, distinct entries for each ‘subsite’- then perhaps MSM would be a better way to go.

In short- I’d say it’s definitely doable, but will take some serious thought about how you see data entry working.  Have you tried out one of the trial options yet?  I’d strongly recommend doing so before making a final decision.  Probably the hosted option so you can get a feel for the MSM approach.

Make sense?

Thanks that helps a lot.
We’re going with Expression Engine, so the learning curve for me starts here!