Multi Lingual CMS.

AlexP

I am making a Content Management System using PHP-MySQL and I want to to be able to add posts of different languages.

This means that the user can choose his/her language from the user's panel and display the relevant posts in his own language.

What is the best and most efficient way of making a CMS like this.

Shall I use a dfferent table for each language? I also want to include a search facility.
Will it be slower for the search facility if I use different tables for each language than one table for all languages?

Any comments and ideas are welcomed.

Thank you!

Alex

nnichols

It would not be a good idea to use separate tables for each language, instead you should just have a column identifying the language for the individual posts.

Search speed would be much slower if you have to search lots of tables instead of just one, though you could combat that problem by using a separate table containing indexing information for all the separate language tables.

I would suggest using a single mixed language table.

AlexP

Thank you Nichols.

It seems that I m going to stick everything in the same table.

Alex

trooper

Just to add to this little discussion

If you read all the values for a particular language from the database at the begining of a users visit and put them into a cookie or session then you would not have to keep accessing the database after the first connection.

However there is a downside to this - if you ever updated the language strings whilst people were using the site then the new strings wouldn't be available until after the user re-visited the site.

HTH