Complete CMS (or framework for CMS) with i18n support

Question

We are looking for a way to publish articles in different languages, including differences in writing direction (RTL/LTR) and of course character sets. The maintainer of the current site works with Mambo/Joomla, but has already found severe restrictions in terms of extensibility.

A similar question has already been asked, but I will add feature and system requirements.

Feature-wise, we need the following functionality:

• CMS standard features (two-stage publishing, permissions, different publishing mechanisms …)
• In addition to standard categorization, articles should have a language meta attribute
• It should be possible to provide a single article in one or more languages
  • Links between articles should indicate the language of the target article, if it does not match the language of the source article.
  • It should be possible to link directly to an article published in a certain language (e.g. mysite.com/article/23423/my-cool-title?lang=ar).
• Authors should have some kind of indication of their language capabilities

At the level of system requirements, we have thought of the following alternatives:

• Standard PHP/MySQL on Apache (LAMP)
• Google App Engine (preferred django)

We are looking for a complete CMS, that can easily be extended and administrated, or a framework that covers most of the functionality. Please consider that we have already read through the answers on the previously mentioned question.

Thank you,

Kariem

Answer 1

Drupal could very easily meet your needs on the LAMP stack. As of Drupal 6 almost everything you need is available. You can have:

• Multi stage publishing and workflow with the contributed Workflow module
• New content can be tagged in a specific language, or created as language neutral
• I don't know if it would be possible to have the CMS automatically list the target language of a link, but it shouldn't be hard with a few lines of code to add a filter something like [link: article ID or name] to insert a link to the other article that would list the language of the link target
• linking to a specific language/translation of an article is no problem, most folks set that up with path prefixing in Drupal, so an english article would be at example.com/en/article/path and say french at example.com/fr/article/path

Answer 2

Have you looked at Django-CMS ?

I don't think it will have everything you mention out of the box, but most of it is there and the rest you can add yourself.

Answer 3

I used Sitellite CMS, it's a good software with I18n support.

Answer 4

I'm not aware of anything that meets your requirements currently available on App Engine. You could customize something like Bloog, though.

Answer 5

Checkout django-blocks. Has multi-language Menu, Flatpages and even has a simple Shopping Cart!!