Multilingual CMS

[RampantAndroid]

Hi all,

Trying to make a website for someone who runs a translation business - one of the features that would be useful would be a way to maintain multiple versions of the website content with a simple drop down on screen to pick your locale (or a simple intro page with a choice) and easy editing of each page and all of its languages. More than anything else, it should have some simple administrative pages. This doesn't need a forum, it will contain little more than information, some photos, a contact page and whatnot.

Now, I gather that Joomla CAN do this with some addons, and Drupal can do it (though Drupal always seemed like way too much work for what I wanted)...what other options are there? What's best? My default is just to take Joomla 3 and beat it into submission (and then get the website admin used to how Joomla works.)

Oh, and this'll be on a linux server where my options are PHP and Ruby, and my database is MySQL.

Thanks a ton!

 

[Leros]

Do you just need to localize the strings on each page or is each page different?

 

[Cerb]

IMO, pop yourself up a virtual, and try Wordpress, then Drupal. I don't know how well Joomla 2.x handles it.

 

[RampantAndroid]

Do you just need to localize the strings on each page or is each page different?

Everything will be translated - basically, each page will have multiple versions - english, japanese, chinese, french.

IMO, pop yourself up a virtual, and try Wordpress, then Drupal. I don't know how well Joomla 2.x handles it.

Looks like Joomla 3 handles it, installed that on a subdomain already. I'll try wordpress, but I always took wordpress to just be for blogs - is it a good CMS for general purposes?

 

[GSquadron]

I had a similar issue like this, a year ago and i choose to make it alone with php and mysql only.
I succeeded and I would strongly recommend not to use a CMS.
This is just my opinion, but you won't be learning anything if you make it with a content management system.

 

[RampantAndroid]

I had a similar issue like this, a year ago and i choose to make it alone with php and mysql only.
I succeeded and I would strongly recommend not to use a CMS.
This is just my opinion, but you won't be learning anything if you make it with a content management system.

I'm not so sure my goal here is to learn this - it's been years since I made a PHP website and while I enjoyed it then, I write code for a living now and don't want to be writing too much code. I mean, sure...I could do this with Smarty, some PHP code and a database...but I'm not really into that.

 

[Leros]

Take a look at gettext. It seems to the industry standard from what I've seen.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gettext

It seems to be pretty easy to use with PHP
http://www.codeforest.net/translate-and-localize-your-web-application-with-php-and-gettext

 

[baseter]

I suggest you to go with Wordpress with qTranslate.