two language website

[intersol]

This is a very common problem and so far i didn't find any CMS to support that. So if you are really interested and ready to pay for the development i think could write this for CMS Made Simple and submit this to the new version.

[Olaf]

You could also use different templates for every language and let every template begin with a different 'start-number' for Bulletmenu. So the pages would be numbered like:
1. choose language
2. english start
2.1 englis first item
2.2 english second item
3.dutch start
3.1 dutch first item
et cetera
the english bulletmenu would start with number 2
the dutch bulletmenu would start with number 3

hope you understand what i mean...

[westis]

I think the development team has this in consideration, as many people have been asking for it. Not sure what version it will be implemented in though.

[jah]

I think Olafs proposal looks good when considering an article based site.One installation, common frontpage, and then links to the other languages.
The only difference between the templates is the start-level for the menu.
To detail the solution a bit (maybe this can be input to the documentation):

For the first page use a template with the selflink tag: {cms_selflink page='2' text = 'English'} and {cms_selflink page='3' text = 'French'}. name the template "common". Include all static information.

Create a Template named "english" and include {bulletmenu start_element='2'} in the template.
Add the selflink tag {cms_selflink page='3' text = 'French'} to your other language.
Create a Template named "french" and include {bulletmenu start_element='3'} in the template.
Add the selflink tag {cms_selflink page='2' text = 'English'} to your other language.

Use the same CSS for all templates.

Create the first page. Select the "common" template and add any dynamic content to your first page.
Create the english pages with the first english page as item 2 and all other pages as children of this page. Select the "english" telmplate for all pages.
Create the french pages with the first french page as item 3 and all other pages as children of this page. Select the "french" telmplate for all pages.

the english pages will have the following menu-structure:

• english first item
  • english first item first child
  • english first item second child
• english second item

the duch menu would be:

• french first item
  • french first item first child
  • french first item second child
• french second item

To ease administration, there should be different users for each language, where the default admin language for the user is set to the same as the content he/she is editing.


A couple of the other menus also support setting of the start level.


As stated above this works well for static content, but is more difficult with news etc.
However, you can have two news categories; one for english and one for french.
Then in your template for a given language you could add the news tag for the specific category.



As an alternative, you could make two installations. Afterall CMSMS is quite slim.
If you have a default language, you can have this installation directly under your root, and install the other one in a separate directory http://www.example.com/french/

Regarding databases, you can use two separate DBs for the two installations or the same DB with different prefixes for the two installations.

[Olaf]

The 2 db's are the most simple solution for installation. You cannot however copy pages and templates directly, say from english to dutch, and then translate/adjust so you have exactly the same site for all languages. Also the overview of all pages is missing.

The solution I mentioned is tested now in www.cg-7.com. Work in progress!, so not all will be working and looking nice...
Thanks for the better explanation Jah!
grtz, Olaf