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?"
"Spending an hour or two" writing a CMS is not going to result in a very good CMS. Will it have a GUI for updating pages? Does it handle caching well? What about granular permissions, where somebody in one department can edit their subsection but not another subsection? And so on... there are a lot of little things that you forget about when saying "it'll only take a few hours" that mature CMSs do that your quick hack won't.
"Just" web design is pretty difficult. You have to cope with severe deficiencies in multiple browsers, memorise weird, counter-intuitive hacks to get things working in Internet Explorer, code three different ways depending on what features are available, remember to avoid some parts of the specification because they are unreliable, and remember to do the complete opposite of what the specification says in other instances because nobody bothers reading it, and so on.
I know it's trendy to think of web developers as lesser beings than "real" programmers, but we've got to put up with a hell of a lot of crap. Jeremy Zawodny (the Yahoo/MySQL guy) blogged about this: Respect for Web Developers - read the comments for a bit of insight.
Bogtha Bogtha Bogtha
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
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.
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...
The English example isn't a good one: use the US flag and most everyone will know what languge you mean, though you still run the risk of alienating other non-American English speakers and the risk of further American imperialism. ;-)
A bigger issue is Chinese: do you use the PRC flag for this? Congrats, you just seriously annoyed people in Taiwan. Use the Taiwanese flag? Good job, you've just incurred the wrath of the PRC Government. Hong Kong's flag? Confusing: now you're using the flag of a "special administrative region" of the PRC, but one that speaks Cantonese: are you including Cantonese characters in your site's localization (and, by extension, using the HKSCS character set?)
The answer here is simple: don't use flags as an indicator of language. Instead use the name of the language in that language. Localizing for Finnish? Use "Suomi". Japanese? Use the kanji for nihonjo.
The only time where it is arguably OK to use flags, is when you are using them to represent the country itself: if you have separate sites for the UK and the US, you can use the Union Jack and the Stars and Stripes: iTunes Music Store does this, for example.