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Ask HN: Multilingual CMS suggestions for startup company

2 points by terjeto ↗ HN
Hi,

I searched for similar posts but didn't find any relevant and this topic has to be important for more than me.. I guess.

My company has a very slow process for updating our webpages. We host the pages ourselves using Django which has support for internationalization and localization. Transifex is aiding us doing the actual translations.

With this setup there are many steps and parties involved in updating/creating a webpage. 1) write english content 2) design/program the html/template files 3) extract language files (.po) 4) upload language files to Transifex 5) wait until translations are complete (we have several translators helping us out) 6) download translated language files 7) deploy servers 8) cross fingers and hope we didn't forget a translation key or misspelled a word

We'd prefer to have our service and the webpages completely separated so that our marketing folks can be fully in charge of all webpages and our tech people can focus on our service.

Other info: We'd prefer a SaaS CMS service for easy maintenance. We tried Wordpress but didn't like the multilingual side and design constraints. The webpages today consist of a front-page with a few sub-pages (django), the account pages e.g. login and forgot password (django) AND a blog section blog.company.com (Wordpress).

What CMS do you recommend?

10 comments

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ilhackernews
What was your exact problem with Wordpress? We seem to share the same architectural needs (although we only work in 2 lanuguages, but one of them is LTR and the other is RTL) and we have Wordpress working perfectly for us. We had to tweak it a little bit, using plugins and some extra dev adaptation (mostly for performance, not language related), but it does the work.

We've tried a few other like silverstripe and Ionize, but both were way to complicated and required a cumbersome process much like the one you mentioned in your post.

terjeto
Thanks for your comment.

We try to be very playful and original with our design and Wordpress don't give the sort of freedom we are after.

When testing out wordpress for the translation aspects, I guess it could work. However we are not found of the solution. It duplicates and dumps a document to the database which slows down the pages. Django handles translations much better.

ibstudios
Joomla can manage it. Google Website Translator would allow you to just have the english and you can edit the translation on google's side for customization. You get 71 languages at once!
gaellelo
Joomla would also slow down our website and I never like the way it's structured. I enjoy working with more straightforward CMS such as Drupal, Typo3 or WordPress. We encountered this list of cloudbased CMS: http://www.cmscritic.com/dir/cloud/

Has anyone experience with them? Squarespace is out of question as they don't allow to host an app on an external subdomain.

matthijs_
I use wordpress with WPML and I love it! Have you looked at WPML?
gaellelo
Yes we did use it for a few months. We're actually thinking going back to it but want to check first all the other possibilities.
tsm
If you're okay with PHP, Drupal 8 looks really promising.
gaellelo
Cool. Any idea it will be released? :)