Geeklog Forums

Hi Dirk, I want to run a bilingual site in English and Chinese. However, I want to make it possible to change languages and some graphic buttons at the same time without the user having to log in. The way that I am thinking of doing the graphic side is to have a different skin for both languages. I don't really want to run 2 different sites concurrently so I was going to try and have 2 seperate config.php files and 2 index.php files for each language. Am I nuts? Will this work? Is there a better way of doing it? Thanks!

This would only work if your visitors (even the ones not logged in) will accept cookies. You could then have an "english" and a "chinese" theme (because of the buttons you mentioned) and let users switch language and theme by clicking on a button or link which would then set the visitor's cookies for language and theme accordingly. You could then modify index.php to pull the english or chinese stories from the database, according to the language set in the cookie. If you want to make this work without cookies, you would need two (more or less) complete installs of Geeklog ... bye, Dirk

Thanks Dirk. Is there any code existing which I can modify which will write to the cookie?

What if we set up an index.html page with some introductory information and then two links "Catalan" and "Spanish" that would send the user to the same GL, but with language+theme in each language? Can this be done without cookies? Is there a way to set specific URLs for language and theme? Thank you.

Another thing what you can do is to modify encoding - modify server mime config directive to set default encoding to utf-8 and just like that modify page header so that meta tag also sys utf-8. This works fine for Latvian and Russian. And modern browsers support unicode and MySQL stores that fine as well. But maybe this won't work with Chinese, I do not know. Roberts---hai

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hai

In our case encoding is not a problem because both languages (Caaan and Spanish) fall into Western ISO-8859-15. My only concern is wether it is possible to set two different links from a normal HTML page, one of them pointing to the GL with Catalan language predefined and another one with Spanish language predefined. Thanks.

I have tranlated 2 sets of uft-8 Chinese (both simplified and traditional) that need to be completed and updated with 1.3.8 coming out. uft-8 is still not yet widely used but getting quite popular with Windows XP. Like qqil said, mixed languages display is not a big problem. The problem is some graphics are done in English and might not be user friendly to people using another language. For those bi-linguals like us, uft-8 is perfect. Rocky