I read an article the other day about Elxis, a content management system that appears to also be a helpful Content Management System (CMS) for multi-lingual websites. Problem was, their SEO Book is written in Greek – that’s not a mistake -yes – Greek.
Anyway, we’ve been working on a website for a client that needed some pretty slick features for their multi-lingual website and have been using Drupal. There are several modules that work very well with the system. And, of course, the Drupal website has a terrific SEO Checklist. We’ve been pleased with the modules we found, we tried out 3 and all of them worked well.
First, use the locale module to translate the core module of Drupal. This step is needed if you intend to have content contributors who will be logging in to Drupal.
Second, and here’s where the Search Engine Optimization functionality excels, here are the steps for adding content in multiple languages:
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- Enable multi-lingual content capability for desired Content Types. Go to Administer > Content Management > Content Types, edit desired content types. Under workflow group, you will see an option for Multi-lingual support, choose the appropriate option (the ‘Enabled with translation’ option gives ‘Translate’ tab to all nodes for this content type).
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- Once you enable Multi-lingual support for a content type, while adding new nodes of this content type, users will see a drop down of all enabled languages and they can select the desired language for the content and any translations they create.
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- Also, for all existing nodes, users with Translate Content permission can see a Translate tab and will be able to add translations to existing nodes.
For a proper multi-lingual menu system and multi-lingual blocks, you may need to use a contributed module called Internationalization.
