Posted by amax on March 19, 2009 at 8:28pm
Hi All,
I wish to convert a small local newspaper site (pretty standard installation with views and CCK, and a nice theme) to allow identical pages to be displayed of a different language.
e.g. all pages are currently in english but if say a user clicks the "switch to spanish" link on the footer, all the pages will have spanish content, pulled from the same database. Exact same menu structure (only translated into spanish)
Is this possible using my existing simple newspaper site? or what is my first starting point / best way to go? I was thinking I might have to have 2 identical drupal installs e.g. eng/site.com and spa/site.com?
Comments
i18n
I think the Internationalization module does pretty much what you need, have you tried it? It allows you to have various languages and you can configure that only nodes of the active language are shown. It also has the ability to make node translations and have the nodes (same content but different languages) connected.
Translations
I've been doing bilingual sites since Drupal 4. With each version things go better. Not perfect, but better. Drupal 6 is far better than 5 for this, so if you are planning to go bilingual, make sure your site is already in 6. But even that, there are a lot o tweaks to do, specially with the untranslated modules, when they provide content to the user interface. Some modules don't even have language (.po) file and making them bilingual is somewhat tedious. But as far as content and navigation goes, Drupal works just fine, with a single installation for both languages.
Brilliant
Thanks for your help yan and ledelboy. I have the switch working perfectly with the Internationalization module now. I was searching for localisation modules rather than Internationalization for my drupal 6 install :(. I really love how easy it is to translate the nodes once installed, amazing module. Looking forward to the untranslated modules I will run into soon :)