phpwcms Support Forum

About shop/products module (in v1.3.5):

Is there a way to have product listing in different languages and display each listing depending on the language selected by the user? For example, I have 100 products and I want to display them in 20 different languages, but I only want to display the 100 product list only in the correct (automatically selected) language. If I put in the product description all languages, then the product listing will look a mess, while, at the same time, the product name is infeasible to be in more than one languages.

Ideally, I would want the shop/cart language in the front-end to be the one selected by the site visitor when entering the site. The site may be constructed, for example, as suggested in: http://forum.phpwcms.org/viewtopic.php?p=83791. But how the shop/cart can follow the language selection?

Can anyone suggest a solution to support such functionality?

I think this could be possible, with some/a lot of code rewrite
or a lot of redundant data (because of setup each article 20 times by 20 languages)

a HACK solution could be to write all text as Listitems to split them in arrays, something like that:

Product: Produkt #1|Product #1|Productname in french|...

same for all text - then you split the list in arrays and choose the right one depending on language switch.

But that all is really a messy solution.
it's better to rewrite the code completly to fit your needs (with own fields for each language).

no instant solution

I am thinking about using an independent site for each language... This means that there will be 20 independent sites, like en.mysite.com, el.mysite.com, de.mysite.com etc. This means that we will need 20 databases and 20 file structures on the server. However, this is a clean solution which allows freedom to optimize site behavior on a per language basis. I am only appalled by the idea that there will be 20 Admin sites... for a single one.

...But I can't see how the shop module could accommodate the needs of a multilingual site...

I think that this integrated shop solution is good enough to be extended so far that we will be able to run a bi- or trilingual site, then with all whistles on But for your plan there are some really nice solutions out there - independent shops.
It's like the integrated forum which phalancs is just going to reanimate - good for some hundred users perhaps, but for a forum like this one really too small (really? hrmm, some doubts arising, possibly could be sufficient too, or not?)

You basically mean oscommerce?

oscommerce is a mess :-/ - xt:Commerce is a bit better (but still an oscommerce clone) and this one is the new star of opensource cart solutions: http://www.magentocommerce.com/ - take a look at systemrequirements for magento - it's seems it's best to run an own server for that :-/ - xt:commerce will run on shared hosts too.

hope that helps...
best
marcus

oscommerce is a mess

That's true, and also for most (if not all) clones, especially when it comes to adapting the design... templates, ha!
I started with interchange - bought out by redhat as far as I can remember, and did some work with some os-clone (don't want to remember), worked with merchantorderform (nice one, easy to adapt) years ago, but until now didn't get hold of any convincing one...

About Magento: I see a problem in that it supports only PHP 5.2.0 or newer... Currently not many shared hosting providers offer PHP > 5. Otherwise, I believe it could run on a shared host successfully...

Nik2004 wrote:Otherwise, I believe it could run on a shared host successfully...

I hope you are right, but in fact this uses lots of Zent and other frameworks, I would not be shure it does so... perhaps there will be special account Servers for this very improving software... *just thinking about offering one of mine *