Using Joomla!, 2nd Edition

Chapter 7. Making Your Website Speak Multiple Languages

The Internet is a global platform, and users will likely visit your website from places that you’ve never heard of before. Joomla has made it very easy to provide your site information to visitors in their own language.

We’ve set up our pet store, and while looking at our site analytics, we discovered that many people from the Czech Republic visit. To make our site friendlier to those users, we will translate the site content into Czech. Since Czech users are increasing and one person in particular, Karel, has been very helpful in providing suggestions, we have decided to ask him to help out in the site administration. He prefers Joomla to be in Czech instead of English, so we will customize the Joomla interface to support multiple languages.

Offering Your Site Content in Multiple Languages

Older versions of Joomla required a third-party extension to support sites with multiple languages (both frontend and backend). That’s no longer necessary, because Joomla 3.x was built from the start with multilingual support in mind. Let’s set up a few languages to see how it works.

Hands-On Exercise: Installing Multiple Languages When Joomla is Initially Installed

If, when installing Joomla 3.x and setting up a new website, you know you want to make your site available in multiple languages, you can choose to install additional languages and activate the required plugins during installation. (If your site is already live, jump to Hands-On Exercise: ...