Info on how to make localization or a multilingual site with multiple ModX installations

I wanted to share some info how we built a localized web site for our company using ModX Revolution. We ended up installing separate ModX instances for each country version. Adn they all have their own GitHub repository branch. This gives us a complete - but separated - control on each country version. Unlike with ModX Evolution and YAMS we are now able to create content on each country/language version separately.

You can use the same approach to create multilingual site as well but I would say this is a good option only if your site structure or content is changing between the different versions. This also gives you the possibility to have a developer or a team working on each country site alone since they only have access to one ModX instance.

My blog post can be found here:
http://movenium.com/blog/2013/11/13/localized-web-site-with-multiple-modx-installations

Hope this helps someone.

PS: Our Finnish and Swedish sites are still running on old ModX Evolution under the same domain so you can even use different versions of ModX in different language/country versions.

Have you looked at contexts at all? They allow you to build separate sites, but within a single MODX Revo install.

This is my go-to article every time I need to do that, and the plugin in the comment by gadamiak works very nicely with no modifications to any server rewrite rules.
http://www.multilingual-modx.com/blog/2011/seo-friendly-multilingual-websites-with-modx-and-babel.html

Quote from: markh at Nov 13, 2013, 05:45 PM

Have you looked at contexts at all? They allow you to build separate sites, but within a single MODX Revo install.

To be honest I haven't looked into contexts before you mentioned them. Not sure if our coders have found those. When searching for a localized ModX solution contexts never popped out, I think.

But if I'm on the map here using contexts would mean that all snippets and chunks (or at least the ones using context settings) would be shared by all language/country versions?

This is an issue for us since we want to make sure that if we have a developer working on one of the sites and updating, he wouldn't be able to do anything which would risk the functionality of the other sites. For instance, guys in US are updating snippet for the US site which then breaks up stuff on the Swedish site and nobody in Sweden knows what the hell is going on.

Here's the solution to that... http://rtfm.modx.com/revolution/2.x/administering-your-site/security/security-tutorials/restricting-an-element-from-users

Basically, you'd have a user group for each context (country), and have the various contexts' elements in corresponding categories, all access controlled through the security system.

Thanks, nice piece of information. I think I'll have to try this out in action on my test server. I'm still wondering how this would fit in the idea of using external script files, version control and developers working on each section of the site.

Well, you can establish directories for each country, use Media Sources (which can be controlled by the Security system as well) and static elements. Each context has its own Context Settings that override the global System Settings, so you can re-define the assets path and other settings, such as site_start, site_url, etc. for each context. You can even create new custom settings that your developers can use.

I recommend using https://poeditor.com for translation purposes. It's an online localization platform that works with various types of files and allows multiple projects with as many languages and translators as you wish. It has Github integration so work is more efficient using it.