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?"

Comments

plone.org

[uits]

http://www.plone.org/

Re:plone.org

[byolinux]

Plone 2.1 contains multi-lingual support by default - LinguaPlone. Works really well. /me is at the Plone conference

Lenya supports mutiple languages

[JumpSuit Boy]

Each page can have different language versions that are shown based on what the browser requests.

Have you checked out MediaWiki?

[mellon]

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.

Don't use flags to indicate language

[Bogtha]

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.

Re:Don't use flags to indicate language

[fodi]

I think this depends on what the flags represent. If the flags represent the nationality of the people its aimed at, you have a valid point. i.e. if you were serving different content based on nationality or geographic location.

If, however, the flags represent mere copies of the same site in different languages I think it's less of an issue. Americans, Australians, etc still speak English. French-Canadians, French(wo)man, Nuemeans (spelling??) still speak French...

How about looking around first?

[Korgan]

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?

Re:How about looking around first?

[GrumpySimon]

CMSMatrix.org is another place to go - it doesn't limit the CMSes to PHP/MySQL ones, and allows you to narrow down the list by your required features. Very useful.

Once you've got a shortlist, then drop by opensourcecms, or the website for the actual app, and try out their demo.

--Simon

Plone

[Earlybird]

Plone does exactly this -- it's one of its main features. Plone probably has the best interionalization/localization support of any current CMS.

Take a look at phpWebSite

[RedLeg]

phpWebSite looks like it has the features you're looking for, plus it:

• Has a nice license (GPL / LGPL)
  
• Is actively maintained by someone with a budget (Appalachian State University), who also actively uses the package, so it's not likely to be abandoned, go stagnant or have unpatched security issues
  
• Supports multiple languages
  

Hope this helps....

Red

TextPattern

[e271828]

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.

Drupal

[remikun]

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.