Multiple languages

[Buddhatech74]

Here is the situation. I am programming a member registration page. My main
site goes to

[url]www.domain.com[/url]

then when they go to register they are sent to

[url]https://secure.domain.com[/url]

My boss wants all the pages wrapped in his template. so what I have done is
copied all the images, templates, and css sheets to the folder in the
[url]https://secure.domain.com[/url] folder. Which works great!

However when I do an update at [url]www.ctpclub.com[/url] I also have to udate the
[url]https://secure.domain.com[/url] site.

Not a big deal here is where it gets tricky.

We have this site in several languages.

german.domain.com, spanish.domain.com, etc

So when I update the english site both secure and regular I have to then go
update the additional sites both secure and normal.

I was wondering if anyone had a solution for keeping the secure stuff wrapped
in the template but allowing for updates so I only need do them to the main
site for any given language. This would knock out half my maintenance.

[davidmedifit]

Buddatech,
Here's some ideas, some of which may be the right answer, impractical in
your situation, or just plain wrong! I am making an assumption, and correct me
if I am wrong, that the "template" you refer to consists of a header, footer
and main menu (maybe on the left). They will probably be the same content and
color, but the difference will be (mostly) the language of the header text and
menu items. With that....

1) Use custom tags - for this, I am making an assumption that all domains are
on the same server (or cluster of servers). You will also need the application
to know which language it is working in. E.g., spanish.domain.com will know to
use custom tag cf_spanish_header.cfm. So, if you make a change to a menu item
you change it once for the secure and non secure version.

2) DB driven menu's - a little more complicated, but you could pull the menu
items, again based on the language, from a DB (which would need things like
title, linkURL, language, sort order) and process them in a CF tag. Extra
points if you import the menu structure into an application variable to act as
a cache, so that you decrease load on the DB connection. Instead of changing
code, you now change DB entries (spawning a whole new application to manage
THAT).

For either of the above, you should try use CSS for things like the font and
the background colors. That way, if your boss asks you to change the banner BG
color from red to magenta, you make one change to one file, and all of the menu
files pull in the change (if you want to keep them all the same, that is).

Hope this helps some.

David

[PaulH]

well your first step is to have just the one application, then internationalize
that. replace all static text w/variables or function calls backed by resource
bundles, all date/numeric/currency format calls w/i18n functions (the LS ones
in cf if they work for your supported locales), etc. serving out localized
content afterwards is simpler than what you're doing now, as i guess your
starting to realize.