Re: [PHP-I18N] Multilingual Web application - how to?

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 ;-)

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/ Marc Laporte       <|>                  http://marclaporte.com /
/ Avantech.net       <|>                     http://avantech.net /
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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
>
>  
>