Multilanguage sites

Hi,

What would be the best strategy to build multilanguage sites with Siteassist?
Would I need to build different siteassist sites for each language, or is there a way that they could share the same layout, CSS, Spry etc.?

Thanks

Berthold Hamburger

If the site is static and using just html then you would need to maintain two separate versions of the site. You could use the same assets though on both of these sites. To share the assets you just need to ensure that any css or spry include references pointed to the same pages. How you would adjust these paths will depend on how you sites are organized. If you have them on the same server but in different sub directories you could just adjust the paths relatively by adding in an extra ../ or two to the path. If the sites exist on different servers then you would want to use absolute paths to the resources and include the full http:// like you would with a link.

If your sites are dynamic there are some other options available to you. You can make the parts of the site that will differ dynamic and come from a db where you have multiple versions of the content. You could use the setting of a session variable to determine the language and which one to show. This is a very custom approach and will require custom coding to implement though.

What happens if I edit the site in siteassist. Won't it expect all the siteassist related folders to be in the same directory as the html? Won't it overwrite any path modifications I might have added to tyhe individual html to point to an upper level css/spry directory?

Berthold

If you rerun the wizard you will recreate the pages for the site. However, since it is a template based site you can just update the template with the new include reference after editing the site.

For the css you can always make use of the mystyles.css file. This css file is always loaded last so whatever you have here will overwrite anything that precedes it. Also, when you have css in this file it will not be overwritten when you edit the site or run the wizard again.

Hi Eric,

Any chance Siteassist would support multilanguage sites in future? I seems sort of strange to have a utility to automate Site creation and then having to go back after every update to change the template manually.
Also, I found a necessity to have separate mystyles.css sheets for homepage and sitepages. It would be helpful to have Siteassist taking care of that automatically without manual intervention.

Berthold

I have logged a request for this feature in SiteAssist Pro, thanks for the feedback.

As for hte problem you are having with the mystyles it should make use of the same file regardless of weather or not you are working on the index page or any of the other pages that are derived from a template. If you look at the reference in the index page it should appear the same as the references on the pages derived by the template. The location of this file should be:

import url("siteassistpro_css/mystyles.css");

Originally Said By: Eric Mittman

  I have logged a request for this feature in SiteAssist Pro, thanks for the feedback.

As for hte problem you are having with the mystyles it should make use of the same file regardless of weather or not you are working on the index page or any of the other pages that are derived from a template. If you look at the reference in the index page it should appear the same as the references on the pages derived by the template. The location of this file should be:

import url("siteassistpro_css/mystyles.css");

  

Hi Eric,

I might not have explained precisely what I want. I have a situation, where styles that have the same name in home page and contents page need to get different layout. For example I want to dimension the HEADER differently in Home page and contents page. To do that I need 2 style sheets. One for home page and one for content pages.

Regards

Berthold

Originally Said By: Eric Mittman

  If you rerun the wizard you will recreate the pages for the site. However, since it is a template based site you can just update the template with the new include reference after editing the site.

For the css you can always make use of the mystyles.css file. This css file is always loaded last so whatever you have here will overwrite anything that precedes it. Also, when you have css in this file it will not be overwritten when you edit the site or run the wizard again.  

Hi Eric,

Consider the following case:

I want to build a 3 language site Spanish, English, German. I start of with the following folder layout created by siteassist:

However to properly manage multilanguage site, I would like to end up with a folder layout like this:

Where each language subdirectory only contains the relevant html files and all share the same css, spry and template:

Could you point out a road map how to achieve this without breaking the design each time I update?
What would be the modifications that have to be added to the existing html and template files?

This issue is of some urgency, as I have to finish the site as soon as possible and have to make a choice on whether I can use your programs for it or not!

Thanks

Berthold

Currently having a multi lingual site like this is not supported in SiteAssist Pro. You would need to manage the sub sites yourself to achieve this result.

If you want to put the pages of the site in a subdirectory you will need to update any references to the templates, css and any other linked in resources. If you want to have the same styles perform differently from the home page and the content pages you will need to manually maintain the different css files for these pages.

Originally Said By: Eric Mittman

  Currently having a multi lingual site like this is not supported in SiteAssist Pro. You would need to manage the sub sites yourself to achieve this result.

If you want to put the pages of the site in a subdirectory you will need to update any references to the templates, css and any other linked in resources. If you want to have the same styles perform differently from the home page and the content pages you will need to manually maintain the different css files for these pages.  

Will you address these issues in future releases? Considering that almost any commercial site nowadays uses at least 2 languages (local and english) this would seem like a very basic feature for a program that is called siteassist. It cannot be too complicated to hardcode a directory based layout system that allows different content versions for the same site layout? I cannot believe that I am the only customer who requests such functionality?

Sincerely

Berthold Hamburger