(Joomla!) How do manage multilingual content within a CMS

CMS: Joomla!

Friday - 11:30am - Friday - 12:30pm

Description:

The topic of multilingual content within websites is getting more and more important. Most of the existing OS CMS solutions provide full UTF-8 support and a list of translations for the general static text used. A implementation of the multilingual dynamic content is far more complex and needs quite some knowledge from the developers. Joomla! found a solution which supports all dynamic extensions and simplify the integration for the 3rd developers.

How this approach is implemented and can be used is part of the session. The possible concepts of versioning or generic content handling is described. In general the aproch to tag a version with a language flag works quite well but leaves the whole responsibility of handling the translations within the developers hand. As Joomla! is a project that has a huge number of extensions and a framework that is very much focused on this possibility to extend the core it would mean that all of the developers in the community must understand what is important in handling languages and different versions. To solve this problem a centralized concept which is extending the Joomla! database layer was implemented. This concept helps to achieve a kind of automatic translation for all Joomla! extensions using the standard DB-Klasses. The whole translation is still focused on manual translations and managing those different versions but the concept is captable to translate any dynamic content which is stored in the database.

I like to present the concept of this approach during the session and discuss the pro and cons. May be there are some good suggestions how the concept can be improved and may be even generalized to be used in other systems as well.

Lead by: