I am seriously considering migrating all my sites from WordPress to RapidWeaver. Tired of non stop upgrading and security issues - no mater how much I try and stay ahead of it. Anyway, I think I have only two concerns which revolve around a multi-language site (English/Spanish) and some CMS capabilities.
In the one website I’m migrating the main menu navigation and pages are similar but our blog pages are quite different with different posts. And neither of the stacks I’ve reviewed look like they handle that.
I can see with CMS stacks that either of us can upload the blog posts (might even consider going through Google blog). So that’s good. So I am thinking the simplest way is that I’ll need to setup two folders of which one is for English and the other Spanish.
Has anybody else dealt with this? Any example sites that are similar to my needs? Is this a best practice? Sure seems easier and less cluttered then trying to work in stacks and having both sets of text on top of each other.
I have seen it done with a flag icon for each language and separate pages for each language. What I did since I didn’t know what languages my clients site would get is I put a Google Translate button on each page. Not completely ideal but it does translate the page.
Thanks for the link and the idea. Cool how it changes to all those languages.
I would have a way of switching between English and Spanish but that would be the only languages we would need to support. I think the main issue is the blog and different post we each have.
Hi, @truegold, I have a 3-lingual site where I use the RWML suite of stacks from TsoojMedia. It works great for me.
These stacks let me have all 3 languages on the same page. The user can choose their language by clicking on a flag or on a word (name of a language). Once that language is chosen, a cookie is set that lets browsers know which language to use from then on. The navigation menu has the links automatically set in the appropriate language, too.
I do not have any CMS system implemented and I haven’t set it yet for a blog, since it is only needed in one of the languages (so far).
I have looked at RWML and it looks quite capable for what it does. I think what I’m fighting against is the cluttered pages of having the text in both languages side by side. I think two different sites (two folders) under one site might be cleaner to my design aesthetic.
The plugin I use in WordPess saves the languages in a popup. Select from the popup and it changes. It’s been a while since I designed the site but I’m pretty sure it’s all separated content. Even different menu bars.
So I think I’m leaning towards duplicating that behavior. And will also use either a CMS for remote updating or maybe a stack that reads from Google Blog. That looks promising as well.
Localizer stack from @instacks is great! But integrating the languages in a site is one side. The other side is the SEO side. It would be interesting if someone could write the best way for SEO and multi languages with RW.
Well, from the aesthetics point of view, there is no problem, because you can style your site to your liking (one setup for all languages). But I agree that in ‘Edit’ mode it is sometimes cluttered (not that I can’t deal with it, though).
For me, this is almost a perfect solution, but I know that many people are more comfortable developing separate websites for each language. Whatever method you choose – good luck…
Good point. I haven’t given much thought to that yet. I’ve been researching each feature I need to replace similar functionality in my WP sites. So far it looks like I can do it all - not exactly but close enough.
I agree. And I could work with it being side by side. But stacks, by their visual nature, take up a lot of space, although they nicely reveal the underlying organizational structure. That I like a lot!
I could almost get away with it for the static content. But the dynamic post need to be managed differently.
I haven;t made a decision yet. I’m still researching and watching all the videos (free and paid) I cna find to make sure I am seeing a clear picture.
Reguarding side by side, structure etc.
Here is how localizer works and how I orginized it.
On the public facing side: just one localizer stack. (Per text area) no content just the cms Id
I use the Totalcms version and here’what I did.
On the cmsadmin page, I added an accordion stack and put a language in each section (5 total accordion drawers/areas for 5 languages) nice and clean.
My main challenge now is that I essentially have two blogs. In WP they were all posts and just displayed correctly depending upon which language was selected.
So I think the various approaches would work nicely for all the static text areas. How would you (or do you?) handle dynamic blog content which, as I think about it in my case, are really different blog posts. Maybe I just need to =manage two different blogs, one for each language.
I’m not doing blogs but it seem s to me that the easiest way to deal with that would be to just copy all the blog posts from both languages into one TotalCms blog and separate them by category one for English and one for Spanish.
The reader could Just then select the language category
.
Localize integrates with Totalcms but you would have to ask Jannis @instacks to see if it could also be used with the blog/how to best implement it. As I haven’t played with that as of yet.
SEO is covered by Localizer Stack (or Google Crawler).
Google Crawler will follow all links, also the link to the German version of your site. And as Localizer Stack works via PHP in the backend, the German texts are indexed also.
I’m in the process of reviewing TotalCMS. Using a category seems like a easy way to implement. I will take a close look at how well Localize wrks with TotalCMS.
I know SEO is important. The first thing I need to accomplish is the multi-lingual blog. Then I
ll give due consideration to the SEO aspects. I will take a good look at the Localizer stack.
@truegold - @instacks has done great work with Localiser and it makes multi-lingual sites a real easy task in Pulse. Before this we had to do two installs, but now all multi-lingual versions can be edited from the same dashboard. It’s really wonderful Just wish I spoke more languages …
And just to mention the third multilingual stack: Lang Menu Stack.
This stack supports the former way for multilingual pages built with different sites and/or pages per language. This helps in producing different urls per language.
