I’ve recently been involved in a project to create a multilingual website for a racing school in Worcestershire. The brief was to create an XHTML/CSS template from a pre-existing Photoshop design, and integrate it into a backend CMS system. There’s nothing unusual about that, however what made this project different was the requirement that the site and the back-end CMS system had to allow for multiple versions of each page to be stored for multiple languages.
My initial thought was to use Drupal and the multilingual plugin, however checking out the forums it appears that the plugin functionality has been integrated into the Drupal core for the latest release, and things are currently a little broken. So I had to think of a different approach. I’ve used the really rather excellent CMS Made Simple many times before, however it does not have multilingual support built in as standard. There is however a branch available that does add this functionality.
When version 2 of CMSMS becomes available this functionality will be built into the core, however I was pleasantly surprised with my experience of the current implementation. If you don’t mind getting your hands dirty with a little manual MYSQL manipulation, installation is a snap and the overall usability of the system is excellent.
So if anyone is looking for an excellent, open source CMS with multilingual support, I can highly recommend CMS Made Simple.