Multilingual Actinic

[pixelhaus]

I've been asked to build an Actinic site in 2 languages. I haven't seen an example but I reckon it could be done using alt text fields (Alt short description, alt full description etc) and then use css to target them.

So for example, I could wrap a div around the English text and then another div around the Spanish text with display set to none. The alternative stylesheet would then do the opposite. The view then clicks a link to change the language and voila!

I'd be interested if anyone has tried this method....

[cbarling]

Why not use variables for each field that you want in an alternate languge. Then include the variables in the layout, and select them via CSS as you described.

Chris

[NormanRouxel]

Use a cookie to hold the selected language. Then Actinic's inbuilt PHP could help with generating the div's.

For example the Product Description could contain English description here.<>Spanish description here. Now, in your product layout(s) a bit of PHP would replace the Product Description variable with code that splits it on the <> and outputs:

<div class="english">English description here.</div>
<div class="spanish">Spanish description here.</div>

If you want to do this on Product Names too, that's more complicated as they are displayed by the Search Results, Cart, Customer Email, Downloaded Order, etc. You'd need some Perl tweaks to split them up.

[pixelhaus]

Why not use variables for each field that you want in an alternate languge. Then include the variables in the layout, and select them via CSS as you described.

Chris

That's what I figured would be the easiest way. As Norman correctly pointed out, it's not going to work for search results without a tweak or 2, but in essence, the bulk of the content could be made quite easily to have 'shadow' content.