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

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

[treerex]

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.

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:Just write it?

[Bogtha]

Um, why don't you just write it?

"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.

you know what happens to time when you code, even when it's just web design.

"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.

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.