Creating a multilingual site in WebPlus

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2 Creating a multilingual site in WebPlus One of the problems faced by a number of WebPlus users involves organizing a multilingual website. Ordinarily, the easiest way to do this is to create your primary language site first, and then use the Save as option to save additional versions of your site. You would name the sites site_en.wpp for an English site, site_ge.wpp for say a German Site and site_es.wpp for say a Spanish site. It s always a good idea to use the ISO country codes for language variants as they are standardised and unique. Once you have your duplicate sites, simply open them in WebPlus and edit the content into the appropriate language. Don t forget to translate the metatags also. Search engines can use foreign language meta information and page names to direct visitors to your site from regional search engines. All you then need to do is place links on your pages to the equivalent page in the other language sites. When creating the links use the ISO codes in the link. For example, the hyperlink to your German home page would be something like You can create links to and from all your pages, or give people a language choice when they first enter your site. If

3 you use the latter option, you only need to specify the subfolder name in your link URL e.g. Once all your sites are created, you need to upload them to your server. Start with your primary language site. Go to file/publish to web and select your FTP account. If you haven t set your account up, click the Add button. You will be presented with the following dialog. Complete the dialog as shown; substituting the FTP address, username and password for those given to you by your hosting company. NOTE: you may also need to specify a folder name check with your host.

4 Click OK and you will be returned to the upload dialog. You should now be able to upload your site by clicking the Upload button. Now to your foreign language sites. Call up your first foreign language site into WebPlus. Again, select file/publish to web. You will be presented with the Publish to web dialog. If it s not already showing, select you main site from the Accounts drop-down. Click on the Accounts button to display the upload dialog. Click the Copy button to make a new FTP account based on your main site details. In the dialog that displays, make the following changes:

5 NOTE: In our example above we ve used ge as the folder name for the German language site, but if your host requires a folder name for your MAIN site, you would add your host s folder name IN FRONT of your language folder name. EG. yourhostsfolder/ge Be sure to give your account a new name. In the above example, we ve added the name of the language to the site name. When you ve made the changes, click OK to return to the upload dialog. You can now upload your language site. During the upload WebPlus will warn you that the folder doesn t exist and will ask you if you would like it to be created, Say yes, and the upload will continue. Repeat the above for every language version of your site. Tip: By using the ISO country codes for your folder names, you re less likely to make mistakes particularly when it comes to creating the language links in your website it s easier to remember what folder names you used in the links. In the next section, you ll see how to create a multilingual site right within WebPlus so it can be published in a single upload.

6 Self-Contained Multilingual Sites in WebPlus Self-contained multilingual sites are only really suited to smaller sites of about 10 pages or less. This is because the site can get quite large, which can slow down your computer. Just as in our first method, create your primary language site first. Once it s created, follow the steps below to make it Multilingual. On the list of site pages, click the html icon above the page list; it looks like this: This will display the html names of your pages in the page list. Right-click your index.html page and select Clone Page from the pop-up menu of options. Repeat this for all your pages. Your page list should now be showing a series of additional pages with the letter a at the end of the original page file name. EG. indexa.html. See the illustration on the next page.

7 If you have used an automatically generated navigation bar in your WebPlus project, you will notice that your site now has duplicate items in the navigation bar as seen below.

8 Don t worry about this for the time being all will be resolved shortly. You now have to make some changes to your duplicate pages. Start this process by right-clicking the duplicate indexa.html page in your list of site pages, and select Page Properties. Make the changes shown below.

9 The page name should be changed to the foreign language equivalent that you want to appear in your foreign language navigation. The file name can be something like indexes.html (for this example I m creating a Spanish version of the site so I use the ISO code es in my file names) When you click the Change button, you will be presented with the following dialog. Just follow the instructions in the illustration below.

10 Your index page has now been renamed to make it easy to identify, and it s been told to save in a sub folder named es. You can confirm this when you are returned to the page properties dialog. You will see the path and the file name in the File Name box. EG. es\indexes.html Repeat this for every duplicate page. When renaming the remainder of your duplicate pages, you won t have to create the language folder again it s already there, so just click the Change button in the page properties dialog and select the same language folder. You can now translate and edit your duplicate pages into your chosen language. You can also repeat this exercise for more than one additional language. Just create a new folder in your site structure for each language you want, and have all the relevant language pages save to that folder. Although you have specified a sub-folder for your language pages, you will still see all the pages in your site page list, so all of them are available to you for editing. The pages only get moved into their respective folders upon publishing the site. Now to the navigation and Hyperlinks If any of your site pages include hyperlinks to other pages within your site, including any manually created navigation bars, these will have to be changed to make sure they point to the pages within each language site.

11 If your main navigation has been created automatically by WebPlus, things are a little simpler. This is because your main navigation is usually placed on your master page so that it appears in the same position on all your site pages. The details and illustrations that follow show you how to deal with navigation in WebPlus X2. If you have X4 the procedure will be a little different, but the same general procedure applies. Check your X4 manual to see how the navigation changes are made. The first thing that should be done is to duplicate the master page containing your navigation bar. Just right-click the master page and select Copy from the pop-up menu. You will be presented with the following dialog. Check all the boxes and click OK.

12 You will now have two identical master pages, each showing a navigation bar showing all your site pages. If you are dealing with MORE than two languages, create more master page copies as required. Clearly, we don t want all our site pages displaying in our navigation bar. Instead, we want our navigation to be language specific. So, let s assume our main site is in English (master page A), and our Foreign Language site is in Spanish (master page B). First, double click the Master Page A icon. This will bring your master page into the WebPlus work area. Double click your navigation bar to edit it. From the dialog that opens, select the Navigation Type Tab and click on Custom.

13 You will now see a list of all your site pages (all languages). In my example I will see a list of both English and Spanish Pages. Because I m currently working on my English Language Master page, I select the first foreign language page in the list and click Delete Element on the right of the dialog. This is repeated for all the other foreign language pages. When all the foreign language pages have been deleted, click OK. The navigation bar will now be back to normal on my Master Page A. You may have to reposition your navigation bar as removing the elements may have moved it, so it may not be in the correct place. Now double click on your Master Page B and again double click the navigation bar. Repeat the procedure above, but this time remove the Primary language Elements; leaving just your foreign language pages displayed. Having created two master pages, you simply associate the appropriate master page with the relevant language pages of your site. This is made a little easier for you because your primary language pages are already associated with Master Page A. So, in your list of site pages, right-click your first foreign language page and select Page Properties. In the page properties dialog, associate the page with Master Page B. Repeat this for each of your other foreign language pages. If you now check each of your pages, you will see that they alternate between you primary language and your foreign language. Furthermore, the navigation on each page will only

14 contain links to the pages that are in the in same language as the page being viewed. The last thing that must be done is to place two small flag icons (representing the languages of your site) and position them in the top-right of your master pages. On Master Page A create a hyperlink on the FOREIGN LANGUAGE flag icon only. Have the hyperlink point to a page in your site and select the foreign language home page. On Master Page B, do the opposite. Create a hyperlink on the PRIMARY LANGUAGE flag icon only. Have the hyperlink point to a page in your site and select the primary language home page. Your site can now be tested in a browser, and you will see that it switches between languages by clicking the flag icons. Once you ve switched languages your navigation will remain within the foreign language part of the site only. Likewise, switching back to the primary language will keep the navigation within the primary language part of the site only. You can now publish your site as normal without having to worry about creating language folders and uploading duplicate sites. Hope this has been of help.