Frog CMS

Me and a friend built a multilingual CMS a few years back. It basically works like this:

• Pages are added and edited in native language (English from here on).
• Language tabs are situated at the top-right of the CMS.
• Each page assumes that it is created/edited in English first.
• All English pages are duplicated for each language.
• Each language page checks against it’s English version, and if it is the same, is highlighted to visually show that it needs translating and thus uses the English version.

It’s really rusty, but works very well. The key to this method, is that it works on the expectation that there is native copy (think of a book for an analogy) that later needs translating.

Now, if only there was a way to promote the Meta content in multiple languages … that would really take advantage of a multilingual website.

To chime in on this I really do need multilingual backend functionality. The most user friendly way would be to use parts, which just appear to the user as tabs. I think this is the best way by far. Makes adding a new translation very simple (from an end user perspecitive) and then some code in the template to attempt to load the appropriate language, fall back to the default if it does not exist, or even to an error page stating your language isn’t available on our website, please click here to continue using our site in English.

The option to either use .htaccess with the domain.com/en/about-us/ or domain.com/about-us/?lang=en method I think is the best. Or even having lang simply as a session variable which can be changed, is detected by the users language set in their browser, defaulting back to a default language if that language does not exist.

That’s my 2 cents and this something I would really love to have!