Frog CMS

I think it would be important to have the language culture in the url for search engine.

I like the idea to "fall back" to the default language if the content in the current language is not found.

But I think we need a better solution than simply add part with the name of the language.

@david - "Just for interest's sake, this is a Frog site running in French and English. I don't know how it is set up!"

I think this is a site that simply has it's entire site structure duplicated. When I look at the URL, it looks like they made two hidden pages beneath Home: "en" and "fr". They then probably added language specific pages beneath that...

That works, but it is very labor intensive from the content editor's perspective I think.

@gido & @david - I think translation can be done in two ways:

1. We write a plugin/helper/functionality of some kind which translates a page with the help of for example Google translate or another such site.
2. We allow the content editor(s) to provide their own translations.

When I look at sites like Google's Translate, I see they translate content into the biggest nonsense there is. I personally would never want to automatically translate a page on my site.

I feel option 2 is the way to go... assuming you both agree, the next question is: how can we keep it as simple as possible for both content editors and site administrators?

Simply duplicating the site structure like I specified in the beginning would be simple enough, but would be prone to errors and labor intensive.

For now, I prefer the "part part" idea. However, maybe we shouldn't use page parts but introduce "translation parts" for lack of a better term?

I'd prefer not using something like "lang=en" at the end since that would mess up our URL structure.

I'm going to see if the W3C provides any specs on this...

@David, thanks for the link. I'm happy to see that frog can manage a large site.

@mvdkleijn - We write a plugin/helper/functionality of some kind which translates a page with the help of for example Google translate or another such site.

No, I never intented to translate pages with an automatic system :) I strongly dissuade this practice to you.

I'm thinking about multilingual content and frog integration. Actually the best way to do this is to create several "branch" (one for each language) and duplicate the site structure.

The problem of using "translation part" is that we can't translate the pages titles or meta-data.

@gido - there is no readon why we can't introduce a "translated-title" field into a "translation-part".

Anyway, I've looked at several recommendations and standards from the W3C and other sources. In essence, there is no provision for a language selector in the URI. I've come across one example, which when we change that to Frog style would give us:

    http://www.example.com/this-is-a-page.html
    http://www.example.com/this-is-a-page_fr.html
    http://www.example.com/this-is-a-page_en.html

For the default, french and english versions of that page respectively.

This scheme could work for us but that yields another problem... both the dash ('-') and underscore ('_') characters are valid characters in Frog page URLs. To make sure our "language selector" works, we'd have to disallow the use of underscore in page title URLs.

I personally don't have a problem with disallowing underscores in Frog page URLs

On another point, it turns out that non-ascii characters in URLs are illegal, at least in HTML4. I couldn't find a reference on this particular topic for XHTML but there are almost no changes between HTML4 and XHTML on URLs, so my guess is that it is also illegal for XHTML.

This means the URL below would be considered illegal since these characters would have to be escaped. (turn them into things like თ)

    http://www.example.com/page-with-utf8-subpage/こんにちは世界.html

What do you guys think? Simply ignore the standard and support it or drop support since it is non-standard?

Creating a multilanguage site can easily be done with frog.

You can create a kind of homepage where user choose there language and enter you’re website. This can be done under the home page. Then you create the directory/pages for your languages like this:

Homepage
 - English
  - English version of the website.
 - Dutch
  - Dutch version of the website.
 - French
  - Frech version of the website.
 - even more languages...

In your template/layout you can add something like this:

<a href="<?php echo $this->content('EN_TranslationUrl', true); ?>">EN</a> (for english translation)
<a href="<?php echo $this->content('NL_TranslationUrl', true); ?>">NL</a> (for Dutch translation)
<a href="<?php echo $this->content('FR_TranslationUrl', true); ?>">NL</a> (for french translation)
and so on...

When creating a page with that layout add the following tabs: EN_TranslationUrl, NL_TranslationUrl, FR_TranslationUrl, …

In those tabs fill in the url to the translated page. In this way you can use whatever URL you want.

It’s a quick work around for the multilanguage site problem.
I agree there should be a solution in the Frog CMS where it would be a lot easier to create a translation for a page.

I sometimes use typo3 to create a website and there you can just create a translated version of the content on a certain page… The rest is automatically done for you…

I tried to explain everything the best I could (I’m not so good at explaining things), if you don’t understand what I mean, just ask and I will try to explain…

1. Do we put a language selector in the URL and use that? (i.e. http://www.example.com/page.html would be the default language and http://www.example.com/nl/page.html would be the Dutch language version of the page)
2. The last one would be nice, but how would we then determine whether or not the /nl/ bit is simply part of the pages/menu structure of the site or a language indicator?

Can’t we just use mod_rewrite? If someone turns on multilanguage via a setting in admin or whatever, then we can make the first url section after the domain the language indicator. Would that work?

@ricks – but it would mean that we couldn’t use both at the same time… i.e. if someone goes to www.example.com/this-is-a-test.html

Maybe I don’t understand mod_rewrite very well, but how come we can’t just redirect to www.example.com/en/this-is-a-test.html?

If the multilanguage feature is turned on, the rewrite rule will be looking for url.com/language/somethingeles. In other words it will look for two slashes.

If there’s only one slash in the URL, why can’t it redirect that to the default language?

Maybe I’m missing something here, but from first appearances to me it looks like this problem might be solved with a proper regex and rewrite…

philippe, we use this idea. it’s simple. Especially as a structure of linguistic versions can be different.

300 pages. And what the problem?

@David – Correct

@jMas – It is the combination of 300 pages and 3 language… which mean you would have to create 300 * 3 = 900 pages to create.

You could create them manually or fiddle with the DB.

At least in this version of Frog.

I agree with fpauser. frog should have a tree-copy/move functionality. I would make some task a lot easier and also in the current version of frog, it would help maintain a multiple language site.