Slashdot Mirror
Multilingual Content Management Systems?
Azraael asks: "I need to make a website for a small business. The website must be available in several different languages and allow for easy switching between the different versions (with little flags in each page that has multiple versions, or some scheme of the sort). User logins are not required. I was thinking of using a CMS to accomplish this in an efficient and easily extensible (more languages, more pages, etc) way. What would be the best option? I've tried Wordpress but it seems to lack multilingual support of the type I described, while having too much of a weblog feel. Mambo with Mambel seems spotty at best. Has anyone on Slashdot done this before?"
Um, why don't you just write it? Do you not have the hour or two it would take to write and debug a simple, CMS based website? I mean, WordPress? Come on!
Of course, it might just be my perception that it only takes an hour or two... you know what happens to time when you code, even when it's just web design.
Anywho, you could always just use a wiki without the whole user-added content stuff if you're really lazy.
When you're afraid to download music illegally in your own home, then the terrorists have won!
http://www.plone.org/
Each page can have different language versions that are shown based on what the browser requests.
Oh really?
http://www.mediawiki.org/
This should let you do your text in whatever language you want, although you might find yourself wanting to tweak the style sheet.
A tangent, I know, but you shouldn't use flags to denote languages. To use the most obvious example, which flag are you going to use for English? The USA flag? Congratulations, you've pissed off all the Brits. The Union Jack? Congratulations, most Americans won't even recognise it, not to mention the fact that's the flag for the UK (it's not the English flag). What about the Canadians? And the Australians?
Jukka Korpela has written an informative article about this.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
Start with http://www.opensourcecms.com/ and have a look at all the various packages listed there. They don't list all available programs, but what they do list are demonstrated there as well.
All packages are required to be coded in PHP, however if you want to start looking at other languages (like perl or ASP) then I suggest looking at HotScripts.com and checking out whats listed in the lists there.
Failing those, how about a google search for multi-lingual CMS packages?
Whats your budget? http://grinz.com/
We admit all this to insure disbelief
I think it is best to learn the basic syntax of a language from a website and write it yourself. As a student of Spanish, I know that translators are notoriously wrong in most all situations. In Spanish and in many lingos, there are tons of idioms that just cannot be translated directly. Conjugation of verbs also gets pretty hairy with complex text. If you learn the syntax of the language, you can look up words individually and place them in the appropriate order. If you want a dynamic look and feel to your site, check out www.sitepal.com This site offers flash characters who speak the text of the language you type. Of course this is not free.
Although it is designed for online coursework, Moodle can easily be setup as a generic website. There are 66 different languages available, and you select the language you want with a drop-down in the upper right corner.
What, me worry?
Plone does exactly this -- it's one of its main features. Plone probably has the best interionalization/localization support of any current CMS.
Hope this helps....
Red
http://ez.no/
Although the name may sound like it is a wimpy CMS, ezPublish is one of the most impressive CMS's around. I am currently in the process of adopting it as the base for my employer's website redesign.
Yes, it is wrote by Norwegians, but their English is superior to that of many native speakers. Also, they have an amazing model for translations and versioning (keeps the 10 most recent versions of a document by default). It also has a nifty nodular system of organizing pages.
At first, it seems a little confusing, especially when the manual starts talking about nodes and objects and IDs and whatnot, but it eventually makes sense. Once that happens, you have a great deal of creative abilities, with templates and the such. I shied away from many other CMSs because they assumed (or at least appeared to assume that) you wanted to do one certain thing, and God help you if you wanted to do something else. ezPublish really seems flexible.
Oh, and to the "CMSs only take an hour or so" group: I wrote a CMS working with one other person, and we easily put 500 man-hours into developing it, adding custom functionalities, and making it look acceptable to non-technical folks (we still don't have a graphical interface, just HTML menus and tables with a sprinkling of Javascript).
Kyle
Textpattern may be what you are looking for. Although it is used for blogs, it is very easy to setup as a general purpose CMS. And it seems to have good unicode support for your multilingual needs.
Whatever your solution, make sure it supports the Accept-Language: HTTP 1.1 header. See RFC 2616, section 14.4.
Example:
Accept-Language: da, en-gb;q=0.8, en;q=0.7
would mean: "I prefer Danish, but will accept British English and other types of English."
-molo
Using your sig line to advertise for friends is lame.
There are thousands of free cms avaiable, and many of them would match the few points you give.
try http://typo3.com/ or better:
look at http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ and compare them yourself.
Plone, which was mentioned before, is worth a look too.
Migard will do this too. you can find it here.
I will be installing it this week for testing
I did.
... I may have some perl scripts laying around ...
But this was back in 1995 when I set up website for an international company (all documents in 5 different languages, users had a set of language preferences, when a translation becomes available, it replaces the other document, etc).
All stiched together with various perl, awk, bash scripts to move Word and HTML files to the right place.
After 10 years this problem is still not solved? I cannot imagine that... Go and have a good look around, I'm sure you will find a CMS that will fit the bill.
And otherwise
Mark
AWF is worth a look -- it certainly supports multiple languages, which seems to be the main question here.
http://www.awf-cms.org/
It doesn't have quite as many features as some other better known apps, but it can still produce a decent site.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
www.postnuke.com
Most if not all of the Nukes might do. PostNuke just happens to be the one that I use.
I've been using Drupal since a while now. When I need a "community" or "journal" Web site, I use Drupal. (Don't say 'blog', please... Please don't. I hate the word.) A few of my sites are multilingual, hence I use the i18n module available on their site. It does require you to modify a few little things in the initial database and to apply patches on the source code, but it works. Also, after applying the patches, not only can you put links to switch languages, but also the URLs are simple: /en/ for English, /fr/ for French, etc.
Plus, Drupal has a good API. That's why I like it so much.
Remi
Home sweet localhost.
Unfortunately, it's neither free as in beer nor as in speech, and requires IE[0], but Red Dot is what my Corporate Masters have me using on a daily basis.
I haven't had to use language support a lot, but it seems fairly solid. It does help that it's a German company that markets to Europe, the US, and others. Language support is sort of a given.
~EEE~[0] I think I just described the Trifecta of Evil for Slashdot. :(
Xaraya is a highly extensible and customizable system. You may want to give it a look.
I architected and mostly coded a system like what you're describing, but it didn't need gui-based editing capabilities, but I just put in the features I needed.
I created a template system where each page was passed a parameter, and the template would load plain-jane html from an appropriate file. This approach allowed us to create ftp accounts for different in-country managers. They could ftp in to add and edit their own versions of pages, and, most importantly for the webmasters, could not screw with the template, the master css file, the look and feel, etc. They could use something like dreamweaver to edit and reproduce the pages (making sure not to generate html/head/title tags) they were fine. All they really had to do was put them back in the right place. I
Creating new sections and master templates required intervention from the webmaster, but this was a plus since it kept site growth organized and not subject to the whims of 'section of the week' re-development.
It was fairly trivial to implement. A GUI-based editor would have made it more of a chore, but mostly on account of page locking or getting 'approvals' before making pages live, a couple features that were discussed, but not critical. In this case, it was easier for the in-country resources to request a 'push' from the webmasters to generate lots of new content at once, and the webmasters got a chance to verify that everything was playing nicely in its sandbox.
I would highly recommend kicking the tires on mFusion. Perhaps it hasn't shown up on many radars but I suspect that's going to change.
I spent the better part of a month going through the laundry list of CMS solutions at the very handy OpenSourceCMS and was having trouble finding a clear solution. Almost by accident, I found mFusion after testing PHP-Fusion 6 which it is based on.
IMHO, mFusion seems tight and efficient at what it does and is forgiving to both the first time CMS admin *cough* as well as newbie content creators accustomed to doing things offline. You can keep only the locales you will need for content and then create things separately from there. A single drop down panel controls which language content is created in. The same appears for users and their view while on the site.
On the flip side, it does seem like a 'two-tree' solution in that you are creating the same content 'X' number of times in each language. A summary panel is provided that can help audit what has been created and in which language. I'm still testing an installation for English and Russian users but so far it has been the ideal, customizable solution for my needs.
PHP-Fusion gets a nod for the real muscle here, but the modifications found in mFusion are a must try when shopping for a multilingual CMS.
MT has multilingual support, it even has language packs, so you could change the menus to a different language. Most of the MT blogs I see are English/Mixed lang in UTF-8, or straight Japanese in JP-2022. You can change the templates so web pages are tagged in whatever language encoding you like, you could have separate "topic" pages in different languages. But it seems most common to use one wide encoding format that supports many languages (UTF-8) and just use mixed languages under that encoding.