Multilingual site advice

[Peter Knight]

Started my first demo multilingual site last night and I'm really pleased with the ease of setup. I had a 1 page demo with 5 languages and a language switcher and menu running relatively quickly.

Before I get too far down the road, I thought I'd ask some of you more experienced multilingual devs what I should be aware of?

Off the top of my head...

1.  Do any multi-lingual SEO modules exist or should I build my own fields here? I normally use MarkupSEO but not sure yet if it supports multi-lingual.
    
2. Are any of the Pro fields NOT multilingual?
    
3. I'm using a single tree with language options as tabs on each field. Is this a better method than having a separate tree for each language?
    
4. Are image Description fields multilingual?

Anything else I should be aware of? For example I read recently that web forms using FormBuilder should be built separately for each language. That's not a huge deal but a good example of something I hadn't anticipated.

 

Cheers

P

 

[Zeka]

Hi @Peter Knight

1. You can use MarkupSEO, just change type of needed field to multilanguage text/textarea ( seo_title, seo_description etc.) 

2. I think yes. Can't remember if I had some issues.

3. All of my sites are multilingual and I never had a need to use a separate tree for every language. You can switch off multilanguage support on template level (Advanced tab) and there is module that lets you control whether multi-language support is enabled at the page / branch level.

4. Yes.

You should read about hreflang.

Also, there is "What should happen when this field's value is blank?" option in field settings.  Usually, I don't inherit values from default language, because in that way I can get duplicated content ( not good for SEO ).

Image and files fields are multilingual through language-alternate values 

 

[Peter Knight]

Hi @Zeka

That's a huge help. Thanks for the information particularly the image and file fields.

[bernhard]

One thing that stole me some time to find out is when you create pages via the API you need to take care that all languages are active on your own as they are inactive by default

One little hook does that trick though: