[thelist] multi-language website

[Dejan Kozina]

The right solution might depend on the project's size. For a couple of 
pages you might as well hardcode them in separate static files, for 
larger stuff is more about what server-side stuff are you (and your 
host) happy to mess with. Any modern scripting language should be 
capable of doing the job, but there is no way you can build something 
sizeable without some coding.

My own humble 2p: PHP with mbstring, Smarty templates, separate Smarty 
config files as string repositories and separate fields in the database. 
Utf-8 everywhere. The language ISO-639 codes used embedded in the URL, 
the config file name, the database field name. Makes for readable files, 
and you can write them with any (utf-8) text editor.

One suggestion if the customer is supposed to add or update content on 
its own: make sure they really have the capability to keep all of the 
separate language versions up to date, otherwise they'll end up with one 
or two languages decently taken care of, and the others showing empty 
pages. Some of the websites ended up this way and after a while it 
becomes something you just don't want to show around...

djn

Eduardo Kienetz wrote:
> a customer asked to have his website in 5 different languages
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Dejan Kozina Web design studio
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tel./fax: +39 040 228 436 - cell.: +39 348 7355 225 skype: dejankozina
http://www.kozina.com/  - e-mail: dejan at kozina.com