Multilingual website and localization has been a challenging issue for a long history. Especially in the European area, most international companies have offices in several countries.

The normal way

I have seen many company websites developed using below methods.

1. A multilingual database table to store multilingual content.

It can be one table or one main table + one sub table.  Typically it is done with bellows fields (In MSSQL)

 ContentId  (int primary key)

 LanguageId (int or char(2) primary key)

 Title  nvarchar(500)

 Description nvarchar(max)

2. A translation admin UI.

Editors can login and translate the content into the languages they need.

3. A multilingual website with a language ID.

Language Id can be in the URL or using URL rewrite to make it friendly. So it might looks like en.mysite.com, cn.mysite.com and nl.mysite.ocm

This tries to fix the problem by content translation. However multilingual sites are not just about content localization. It is also about layout changes, web design or even the functionality. Here is simple example, your company is running business in both China & Netherlands , and so you have two languages of your website, cn.mysite.com and nl.mysite.com. On the national holidays of China , you want to add some ads on the homepage of cn site but do not want to change anything on nl site. By above normal approach, there is not an easy way to do it. Not to mention some languages requires completely different layouts.

International companies require more about multi sites than multilingual sites. Big organizations may have different departments, each department has its own website, or companies have one public and several intranet websites. Sharing content and design across those websites is always a challenging task.

The Kooboo solution

Finally Kooboo teams came up with a solution, site inheritance and localization. This is one of the key reasons why companies choose Kooboo.

Inheritance

At Kooboo, the concept of inheritance at Object Oriented Programming is extended to a maximum. A whole website is being used like an object; a sub website can inherit everything from parent site and localize any elements he wants. He can localize a content item, as well as design elements like layout template, content template or theme.

In order to fully use the concept of inheritance, the most important thing is to define the site relations. Before implementing multi sites, you may want to draw a site relation. Below is an example of site relation.

If you use Root, you can put all the global elements in the Root, your site relation might become looks like below.

<!--[if gte vml 1]>