A site in several languages

NeoFrag Reborn speaks six languages: French, English, German, Spanish, Italian and Portuguese. This guide explains what translates by itself, what you translate yourself, and what a visitor sees when a translation is missing.

Two kinds of text

• The interface — buttons, administration menus, messages, e-mails: it arrives translated with the language packs (addons, shipped with the product). Nothing to do.
• Your content — your news, your pages, your categories, your menu, your widget titles, your wiki pages, your donation campaigns…: you write it, and you write it language by language.

Writing in another language

An edit screen writes in the administration's language, and says so under the field: “Written for English”. To translate, switch language — the site's language selector, or the address itself: /de/admin/… instead of /en/admin/… — and open the same content again: its fields are empty where nothing has been written in that language yet. Save: the other languages keep their text.

What has no language stays shared by all of them: a date, an image, a price, a display order, an author. You enter it only once.

What the visitor sees

The visitor reads the site in the language of the address (/de/…), which they choose with the theme's language selector. For each piece of content, they see the best translation that exists: the one in their language, otherwise French, otherwise the first language written. Content written in a single language therefore stays visible everywhere: it is simply not translated.

The administration shows what is left to translate: lists flag content with no text in the screen's language, and the translation check records the interface texts missing in a language (The administration panel).

What does not translate

• What members write — a forum topic, a message, a comment, a classified ad — stays in the language it was written in.
• Custom emojis keep their name everywhere: it is a code, not a text.

Search engines

Each language has its sitemap, and each page points to its other languages. Content that has no language of its own — a forum topic, or a page whose text is the same in every language — declares itself only in the site's first language: six copies of the same text, each one “official”, would mean none of them is kept. The details: Search engines.

For developers

A module that stores translatable content keeps it in a <table>_lang table (one row per language), reads it with join_lang() and writes it with ecrire_lang(): The framework.