Hello all,

XOOPS looks like one of the very cleanest solutions in the PHP CMS world. I want to construct a serious portal / community site for researchers in a particular field, and the site has to be bilingual -- i.e. users have to be able to change the language of at least all the interface elements on the fly (this is very easy with PostNuke). The lack of real support for multilingual sites seems to be one of the few major weaknesses of XOOPS.

So I'm wondering what solutions exist to this problem, as I'd really like to use XOOPS.

1. The good people who created the Multilanguages hack have quite responsibly filled it with disclaimers... I'm wondering if, in the educated opinion of experienced XOOPS users/developers, anyone can recommend using this hack on a serious production site that a lot of people will be relying on?

2. Are there plans to include true multilingual support in the XOOPS core (in the near future), or is this not a priority?

3. Are there any other practical solutions, e.g. some kind of multisites set-up?

I would be very grateful if anyone could help me out with this. And congratulations on building a great product and a supportive community!

Thanks for the kind and encouraging words

1. I have never used it myself, but the people behind this hack are thorough and have done a good job. The reason it is still a hack is because the solution used isn't the one that the development team prefers, but it is the only one available to us at this time.

2. There are plans to include this native multilanguage support for XOOPS3, maybe sooner. Not for XOOPS 2.2 (the next major release), but that's because these changes are too big to add to the already big changes planned and in development for XOOPS 2.2. Adding another layer of complexity with the multilang support will make the 2.2 development less stable and that is not what we want. But that certainly doesn't rule it out for 2.4, adding mutlilang support to the XOOPS2 series.

3. This is a possibility, but I'd not recommend it. It means that you have to synchronise the content of every subsite manually, and that isn't a very practical solution. You'd be running and managing as many sites as you'd have languages, with only a few system specific data shared across the sites (layout, users).

Herko