RSSMultilingual Content Management Systems
05 Dec 2009 No Comments
I’m on a mission, I have a new project and it is my true first multilingual website, so I’m scowering the web for a content management system that will help me complete the brief with the easiest of ease. So without further due, here are the results…
Word Press
Using the WPML plugin and a theme built specifically to handle multilingual content. You can find a list of “translation ready” Wordpress themes on the wordpress.org site, simply select “translation-ready” and hit search, results are displayed directly below the search form.
Website baker
You have to have some basic knowledge of PHP to edit the templates to enable users to choose which language they want to view the site in. I don’t want to be messing around with code, for those who do, here is a useful link:
Step by step instructions on how to set up your multilingual site with Website Baker
Content Now
According to their site:
Multilingual sites can be developed by duplicating contents of a language site version. And it’s just one click!
Sounded promising, but after navigating their site I found very little pertaining to support documentation or a community of developers. On closer inspection, their site isn’t even multilingual.
phpComasy
Looks like it is a great product, if you understand German… on entering their English support pages you’re presented with this statement:
This documentation is currently very small. If you are able to read German, please have a look in our German documentation of phpComasy.
I’m no expert developer, I will need support and I want it to be “easy”. Another dead end for me…but ideal for German speakers.
TribIq
Whoo pretty! and they are boasting about exactly the feature I’m after. This is a well developed CMS, they have a free “community” version which you can install on your server. Once your site outgrows this basic version there are Pro and Business upgrades, which, of course, you have to pay for. However the free version is feature rich and you can do almost everything on it.
It’s only downfall is the lack of downloadable templates and skins. Of course you could design and code your own if you’re that way inclined.
The verdict
I’m biased, I have previous WordPress experience and so I’m half way there on the learning curve. True, I’ve never had to develop a multilingual site in WordPress, however I’ll have a go and report back on my exeriences. I thought I would at least look arround and see what else is out there, but nothing I’ve seen has tempted me away from WordPress. Well, exept maybe Tribiq, which I will try if WordPress turns out to not be flexible enough for my needs.
I’m drawn to Tribiq’s ability to allow you to create a page with any layout you want, something that has always bugged me about WordPress, is that you can almost always tell by the layout and the elements on the page when a site is powered by WordPress.
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