Building future proof multi-country/multi-language websites
Many of our clients are transnational companies that are spread across the countries. In our globalized world, we see a trend that creates more complex needs for publishing workflows and websites implementations to support such use cases.
Often, we find these common requirements:
- multi-language
- united design
- the site structure should be common for all countries, yet it can differ from one country to another
The last item is the most vague one. Basically it means that countries should be able to have unique pages, unique menu items and even a unique menu structure!
In Drupal 7, thanks to Drupal community, there is a huge amount of modules that can be used to fulfill all these requirements. Sometimes its just hard to know which solution is the best, so the idea of the session is to present clear solutions to common problems.
We already use Drupal 8 in production for various clients. Not all presented solutions are available for Drupal 8 yet, but the way how we build sites in 7 is designed to be compatible with how things will work for Drupal 8. By relying on entity translation & language fallbacks for example, we already establish solutions that work similarly or even better in Drupal 8.
In this session, we will share what we found to work best over the years of building building multi-country/multi-language websites for our clients. You'll learn what was our approach in the beginning, what issues we had and how we solve them right now.
Topics being covered:
- Architecting a multi-country/multi-language site
- Implementing access control using Domain Access
- Attaching languages to domains using Domain Variants or Language Domain
- SEO best practices for implementing multi-country/multi-language sites
- Implementing total language fallback based on Entity Translation, Language Fallback etc.
- Outlook for Drupal 8: what remains & what will change?