Thread

Hello,

I am trying to build up a blog site for our radio show here in China. We are trying to set up an english back end and control panel so we can add things by ourselves. however we write in chinese. also we need the page to display in 80% Chinese. This means all the buttons on the blog page like “comments” “more”.

So we would need Helvetica for Englisha and standard Chinese.

here is an example: http://blog.sina.com.cn/u/1231920714

Is this possible with the language packs? Can the Discussion Boards also have the same functionality. CAN i have an ENGLISH and CHINESE Site when it comes to navigation?

Thanks

Yes, that is possible. I’ve done sites like that, ie with English and another language, although not actually Chinese. First, to stay clear of potential encoding issues, I strongly suggest to use utf-8 throughout the site. If you do, all the users need are the necessary fonts installed, and that is usually not an issue.

Practically all of the public pages are created by templates: In these templates you can put information in whatever language you wish; the same is true for the entries which are displayed on the site. There are a few exceptions (dates, eg.), which you would need to change in the language packs, but these are trivial.

My suggestion would be to download the free Core version, and give it a go. I see a few challenges, perhaps, but no unsurmountable problems.

No language packs are necessary for what you’re trying to do: The backend is naturally in English, and any characters which may be rendered in standard HTML pages can be output by ExpressionEngine. Ingmar’s correct—UTF-8 is the only way to go for mixed-language content.

wow that is awesome. i am wondering if the discussion board buttons can also be in chinese? most of our users will be here in china so hopefully the members can be able to update their profiles using chinese and whatnot. i will give this a go tonight. Basically everything shown to the web viewer is in chinese and our back end is in either english or chinese.

Yes, the forum is also modifiable, but I can tell you it ain’t a piece of cake. You will need to edit a language file with hundreds of phrases, but after having done that your forum’s user interface can be Chinese. The Forum Control Panel has a separate language file, and if you edit the array of phrases in that language file you can have a Chinese-language Control Panel as well.

EE doesn’t currently have an option to switch Control Panel language interfaces easily, but if you want to go in on development of such an Extension I may be able to join in the payment. Our firm needs that kind of thing.

if its one document where i can pretty much go through and swap out the english for the chinese that is not a big deal. we have a chinese discussion board already that we can base translations from. when you say control panel i am not sure what you mean.

hopefully it can be the same as the blog site where We modify the site in chinese but the user inputs board entries in chinese. is that what you mean?

thanks