Hi Denis,
You can look into using or analyzing a multilingual CMS. Last time I looked, the following PHP open source CMSs offered this feature: TYPO3, Glasnost, eZ publish and OVIDENTIA. (links are provided on MultilingualDev). You may get some insight on how & why they chose specific technical solutions to your 3 questions.
This page contains many links related to this matter. There is a great video from eTranslate:
http://tikiwiki.org/MultilingualDev
Another issue is how to manage to keep all versions in sync and how to handle untranslated pages. This page explains well the difference between The "Two-Tree" concept and the "one-tree-fits-all-languages" concept:
http://typo3.org/1220.0.html
Tiki CMS/Groupware handles multilingual content in upcoming version 1.9 It is still in developer release stage however, I have been using the multilingual feature in production sites for several months. Tiki uses Smarty as a template engine.
Best regards,
-- M ;-)
////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////// / / / Marc Laporte <|> http://marclaporte.com / / Avantech.net <|> http://avantech.net / / Tiki CMS/Groupware <|> http://tikiwiki.org/UserPagemarclaporte / / / //////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////////
Denis Gerasimov wrote:
Hello list,
I need to develop a multilingual web site and I am looking for the best way of handling this task. There are three main issues I know:
1. Storing multilingual data in a database. Possible solutions I know: a. many tables, one per each supported language, e.g. news_en, news_de. b. one table having many columns with translations, e.g. (id, date, text_en, text_de) We use MySQL 4.1 as a back-end.
2. Multilingual HTML templates, possible solutions: a. one generic template for everything, one per each language, like contents_en.tpl.html, contents_de.tpl.html b. many localized templates for each page, e.g news_en.tpl.html, news_de.tpl.html Template engine is Smarty.
3. Storing current language variable, possible solutions: a. inside the URL like /en/news/ b. using cookies c. using sessions Web server is Apache2+mod_rewrite with PHP5
What are pros and cons for each solution? What are other possible solutions for the above issues?
Best regards, Denis Gerasimov Outsourcing Services Manager, VEKOS, Ltd. www.vekos.ru
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