Hello,


I'm working on a site for an ESL school. They teach Chinese students English so the site needs to be in Chinese but the owner would also like to have an English side. I don't speak or read Chinese and the owners of the company are English so I think the best thing to do is design a front page with links to each language.

Once I get the English side built I can have it translated into Chinese and build the other side. Doing it this way I can have keywords and a description in English on one page and Chinese on the other.

The problem is the owner does not want to waist time updating two sites with the same information. (Kids weekly progress reports and notes)

Is there a better way to do this? The owner would rather only have a Chinese site than update two sites.

Thanks for the advice.

I'd design the site so that the language was kept separate from all other parts. Something along the lines of driver loads configuration variables (e.g. active language), calls POST processor (for form submissions), creates page-specific content outputting the correct language for text (e.g. page content, title, meta data, etc.), calls the language-specific template which outputs the page-specific content in the correct language.

Nice! Thanks so much for the reply that sounds like what I need to be able to do. It's a shame it way over my head. I'm going to do some searching and see if I can figure out how.

If you're building from scratch, it might be helpful to read my post at http://www.webmaster-talk.com/html-f...tml#post898229

Originally Posted by Snot

Nice! Thanks so much for the reply that sounds like what I need to be able to do. It's a shame it way over my head. I'm going to do some searching and see if I can figure out how.

I have some experience with building multi-lingual sites.
I'm afraid Jeremy's suggestion is over my head too so you are not alone

I'm not sure about your time frames and budget but you might want to consider learning about a content managment system like Drupal and Joomla.
They come with ready made language packs so at the flick of a switch or click or a link you can easily change all your menus and site links from English to Chinese and vice versa.

They are using Joomla right now I think www.pgzz.net

I've never used it before and I thought I would be able to edit the design of their site without building from scratch but at first glance that didn't seem to be an option because there was so much extra stuff added to the code from the interface they were using.

I might have to have a look at it again and see if its an easier option. If I can get a new design and they can still use the same interface to update that would work out best all around.

thanks for the advice.

Originally Posted by Snot

They are using Joomla right now I think www.pgzz.net

I've never used it before and I thought I would be able to edit the design of their site without building from scratch but at first glance that didn't seem to be an option because there was so much extra stuff added to the code from the interface they were using.

I might have to have a look at it again and see if its an easier option. If I can get a new design and they can still use the same interface to update that would work out best all around.

thanks for the advice.

I can't telling from looking at the source if its Joomla or not.
I will say that CMS systems generate HTML in quite a different way from traditional websites so it would be a mistake to try hacking the code without a good understanding first. If you want to try a CMS there is no avoiding the learning curve.

This thread might be useful to you.
I'm not sure.
http://www.webmaster-talk.com/domain...nt-domain.html

Thanks for the help. I've looked in Joomla and i've decided i'm going to take the easy route and design the page with both english and chinese text.

Cheers