Multilingual product catalogue: is MODx a suitable solution...?

One of our customers has a product range with many product categories. Each product category contains products and each product contain specific attributes like information, images, video and downloads. Some downloads can only be viewed by sales staff in an extranet (username/password) environement.

The website targets the European market and thus have to be multilingual. For the product range we are thinking of two scenarios: the first (most simple) is that the complete site architecture can be translated, the second is a custom structure for each country that can be translated (in some cases in more than 1 language: Belgium for example needs to be translated into French and Dutch…).

For the Content Management users we need two roles: administrator (can add, edit and delete all content objects) and editor (can add new content but is not allowed to publish).

Our questions:
Is MODx a suitable solution for this case?
Are there examples we can see that uses 1 of more of the components described above?

Any other suggestions would be greatly appreciated…

Thanks,

Kuifje…

MODx does not support multiple Languages "natively". You’ll have to create a Workaround using Template Variables and/or Snippets. Have a look at a possible solution explained here: http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Make_Multi_Lingual_Site

In most of the cases, the Document Tree is split into different "Language-Branches" with the identical structure underneath. However, this can become very tedious to administrate when using large Document trees. You’ll also encounter Problems with some snippets that are not built for multi-language sites (I, for example, had problems with the search snippet. It always returned results from all Languages instead of just one).

I’m sure you could build such a huge multilingual Site using MODx but i’d wait for better Multilanguage support or use another Product.

There are many ways to proceed, I know I used TVs and some hacks to do it but right now, I’d say the best addon to localize a website with MODx is the - not very well know cause it’s buried in the french forums - l10n snippet (the thread is in french, but the snippet is commented in english)

Any chance that could be released elsewhere? I think most of us have the (insert language we don’t speak here) forums blocked, and it’s hard to get to and download.

Since you ask, I translated and posted on the english boards

http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php/topic,22140.msg136451.html#msg136451

Thanks for the comments on the multilingual issue, any ideas on the product structure yet?

The product structure shouldn’t be an issue, you can deal with it easily with TVs + Ditto and its filter capability. I even suggest you use the tvExplorer snippet to build an advanced search form like this one (it’s built with tvExplorer).

To handle the authorization to display/edit some TVs, you just wrap them in a MemberCheck snippet call to check if a webuser is logged in (and authorized) or not...