Building a CMS for bilingual website - need tips

Question

Hi guys, I'm building a really simple CMS for a bilingual website. The website would have 5+5 pages each of which would have varying content. Its like you have an about us page, services page a news page and contact us page in two languages.

I was wondering that on the CMS backend admin panel I would be making .. what is the better option should I make two separate admin panels for the two different languages - it seems like over kill though but again what is the preferred way in such a case where you have a cms website in two different languages...

Or should I consider using a third party cms for this? I haven't worked in Drupal or in Jhoomla much and have little idea here. Basically my client needs a corporate website which would have an:

About us page, Mission Statement, Products[this should be updateable], News and Updates[updateable], Contact Us, Feedback etc to name a few.

The site should be bilingual as well.

How should I get on this I need to submit a mock up soon. I have about 10 days to finish the project so would like to hear some ideas on how to get started.

Answer 1

Given the time constraint and the difficulty to write a CMS ( it's easy to write actually, but very hard to get it perfected, to do whatever you want to do), I suggest you using Drupal.

Here's a pointer on how to do multi-language support in Drupal. The idea is that you specify .po files for the relevant strings:

The locale module allows you to present your Drupal site in a language other than the default English. You can use it to set up a multi-lingual web site or replace given built-in text with text which has been customized for your site. Whenever the locale module encounters text which needs to be displayed, it tries to translate it into the currently selected language. If a translation is not available, then the string is remembered, so you can look up untranslated strings easily.

The locale module provides two options for providing translations. The first is the integrated web interface, via which you can search for untranslated strings, and specify their translations. An easier and less time-consuming method is to import existing translations for your language. These translations are available as GNU gettext Portable Object files (.po files for short). Translations for many languages are available for download from the translation page.

Answer 2

You can keep it inside one administrator's page. Just supply a list of languages somewhere on the page for a quick switch between them. So when admin is editing a page in English they choose Spanish and the English page is automatically saved and they go on editing the Spanish version.

The other thing you can do is use a tabbed wysiwyg editor like Spaw2 and put every language in it's own tab (since you will probably have only a couple of bilingual fields).