I would like to know the opinion, experiences, advice and pointers to hacks from the people in this forum regarding the two ways to create multilingual sites and their drawbacks:
The official way to create a multilingual site enables the use of multiple site trees/menu structures. However those site trees are not connected to one another. This means:
- - For every page you want to translate, you have to tell the cms to create a translation (i.e. a new page in a new language) for you. This is not done automatically.
- - If you change the location of a page in the site tree (change the menu structure) the location of that page in the translations is not changed accordingly, i.e. you have to change the position of all the pages in all your translations
- - if you remove one page in one of the languages, the pages still exists in the other languages
In some instances this is the right thing to have, for example a firm with branches in several countries, and those branches have to operate independent of one another but still need a common look and certain pages need to correspond to one another. However, in this case I would probably try and find another solution for this, but YMMV.
Enter the unofficial way: Every language has an extra tab in the interface of a page. Managing the structure of a multilingual website is much easier in this case. My opinion: from a usability point of view this is much easier. However:
- - How does this work out for things like search?
- - How does this workout for things like numbers and dates and currency?
- - Will this hack still be possible in the future?
What are your opinions on this, what are your experiences?