Trying to convert a big bi-lingual site

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rallycross
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat 20. Dec 2003, 02:13
Location: Bönningstedt near Hamburg, Germany
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Trying to convert a big bi-lingual site

Post by rallycross »

Hi all,

I discovered this great software just some days ago and spent most of my nights in getting it to work.

I do not make money with setting up or developing sites, so hopefully my questions will not be too silly for you...

Although being an amateur I have a big site on a motorsport called Rallycross and this thing is getting really big (http://www.rallycross.de). Now I need to convert it to a cms. And I chose to use phpWCMS. I am currently using my Mac to develop it and I will later transfer the system to my provider's Linux system.

However, I have several problems:

(1) My site is bi-lingual, which means it is in German and English. Therefore I need to switch between these two languages and therefore I need two site trees. Is this possible with phpWCMS? Not all content that is availabe in one language is availabe in the other language.

(2) If you look at my site then you see that I for example have a lot of news online and even more news offline. In order to get the same thing done in phpWCMS, there are two problems.

(2a) As the articles have a start and end time, I want my news section to show all articles that have a valid date and then I would move it to the archive. However, I want to see the COMPLETE news and not only the headline.

(2b) I don't want to promote the first article. All of the articles should look the same way.

(3) I have a question on the structure of articles. Most of my articles have a headline and a main text. Some of them have pictures. Some of them have html code incuding tables with pictures (like the sales news). All of this seems to be possible with articles and content parts. However, each content part has its own headline and sub-head. Is it right, that I should not add text to the headline and the sub-head of all content parts, if my article just contains a regular message consisting of a single headline and the news?

(4) Sometimes I have articles that only show a kind of teaser text on the news page and the full articles is shown when you click on a link. For example look at the German part of the site. The article "On Yer Bike Colin – Terve Mikko!" is a good example for that. How do I handle this type of article?

(5) Silly question from an amateur: Are there pre-made templates somewhere? After I installed my copy of the system, there were no templates available. As I did not find any pre-made templates, I actually typed in the text from Olivers movie, when he showed the template entry page. I know this was silly, but I did not find any other way to quickly get the system to work with valid data.

However, if you could publish some templates in a text file, it would help me and others starting to learn the system. At least I think so.


Well :roll:, a lot of questions. Sorry, but converting the site will take quite an amount of time and I don't want to find out too late, that I chose the wrong system. :x

Anyhow, Oliver you did a great job :D and I am quite sure this system is the right one for me.

Thanks

Andreas Schrader aka Rallycross
Last edited by rallycross on Mon 22. Dec 2003, 03:09, edited 1 time in total.
Bijan Hemati
Posts: 191
Joined: Sun 9. Nov 2003, 00:18
Location: Austin, TX

Post by Bijan Hemati »

Hi Andreas,

I found this thread that answers your first question.
http://www.phpwcms.de/forum/viewtopic.p ... t=language

The answer to question #3 is. You are right!
to achieve the same thing for question #4, use summaries.
Here is a sample template posted in this thread. Just copy and paste.
http://www.phpwcms.de/forum/viewtopic.p ... ll+padding

Regards,
rallycross
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat 20. Dec 2003, 02:13
Location: Bönningstedt near Hamburg, Germany
Contact:

Re (1) Changed Code and see error

Post by rallycross »

Hi Bijan,

thanks for the answers. I had a look at them and have some more questions.

I did the code change that should give me access to specific parts of the tree in order to make the site multi-lingual. However, after changing the routines, I get these errors:

Parse error: parse error in /Library/Apache2/htdocs/include/inc_front/front.func.inc.php on line 527

Parse error: parse error in /Library/Apache2/htdocs/include/inc_front/content.func.inc.php on line 208


What did I forget or do wrong? Can you help? Or maybe post the updated files?

Could you also describe how to use it with lets say two templates for German and English?

Thanks in advance.

Rallycross
Vanja
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat 8. Nov 2003, 14:00

Post by Vanja »

Could you also describe how to use it with lets say two templates for German and English?

Hi...
You should put all the files /en and ger ones/ under same index (start) page...the one u choose /ger or en/ should be hidden from displaying on left navigation...create 2 templates...one for en and one for ger...it could be the same ones (with same header, footer and stuff...) and use each of them for ur pages dependly are they ger or english. The only difference is that You put on a left block a different starting point...so for example -> the ger site should start from main index page and the en one from the hidden en/index.htm...To achieve that You should use ID of the en/index page...For reference check:

http://www.phpwcms.de/forum/viewtopic.php?t=287
where are arbitrary starting points for NAV_TABLE_column explained...

Hope I helped...I had the same problem...and it's very simple in spite of difficulty with explaining...You just need some time to play with wcms :wink:
rallycross
Posts: 3
Joined: Sat 20. Dec 2003, 02:13
Location: Bönningstedt near Hamburg, Germany
Contact:

Post by rallycross »

Hi Vanja,

thanks for the explanation. I think the fact with the tree I understood. My major problem is that my system doesn't work anymore, after I did the changes to the files front.func.inc.php and content.func.inc.php. I am quite sure that I did not do a copy/paste mistake.

Could you send me a copy of the modified files front.func.inc.php and content.func.inc.php that work well on your system?

Rallycross
Vanja
Posts: 19
Joined: Sat 8. Nov 2003, 14:00

Post by Vanja »

I've send You those files via PMB since its a quite a listing...
cya
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