Just interested in peoples thoughts on creating a dual language site (English/French). I haven't done anything like this before so there may be things I need to be aware of. At the moment I don't know if the French will be a 'mirror image' of the English or different.

I use PHP and MySQL and I'm thinking that I'll have 2 sets of tables, one for English and one for French and the structure of the tables will be the same. In fact I could just do it with one set of tables and give each record a LanguageID and filter out the results that way. Either way each row will have a LanguageID - is that the best way to do it?

Also, if the two languages were 'mirrored' could you have an update page with two update record forms on it so you could have English and French side by side. I'm guessing you can with a bit of tweaking of DWs code.

What do people think? Has anyone done something like this before and how did it go? What issues arose that I should be aware of?

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* Sorry... how do you do that again?... *

Ya, sort of a toughy. If you really want to research it a bit more, check the popular MySQL/PHP CMS's that have multi-language support, like Drupal, Mambo(?), osCommerce (ecommerce), and I think phpWebSite.

See how they do their language relationships.

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Chris Charlton <i>- DMXzone Manager</i>
<font size=1>[ Studio MX/MX2004 | PHP/ASP | SQL | XHTML/CSS | XML | Actionscript | Web Accessibility | MX Extensibility ]</font id=size1>

Hmmm, I hadn't thought of that, it could be a good solution so I'll look into it. I know the client wants a Forum as part of the package so I would probably have used something like phpBB or similar anyway. The problem I have with 'out of the box' CMS is that they are usually way over featured for my needs and I don't like having to wade through and change miles of code to make it look the way I want. Also, the fact that there is so much flexibility often confuses me let alone the client. Bespoke is much better as I know exactly what's going on and I can keep things really simple for the client at the CMS level. However, I won't rule out your suggestion. Thanks Chris.

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* Sorry... how do you do that again?... *

<BLOCKQUOTE id=quote><font size=1 face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" id=quote>quote:<hr height=1 noshade id=quote>...The problem I have with 'out of the box' CMS is that they are usually way over featured for my needs and I don't like having to wade through and change miles of code to make it look the way I want. Also, the fact that there is so much flexibility often confuses me let alone the client.<hr height=1 noshade id=quote></BLOCKQUOTE id=quote></font id=quote><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica" size=2 id=quote>
True, true!