Many people approach us complaining that the usage of different articles in different languages is only possible with a Joomfish club membership extension. What I like to stress in this article is that the term "only" is not true in this respect.

The localization of content is one of these organizational issues which is closely related to organization of your website. In fact it all depends all on the structure of sections, categories and articles you choose for your site. I will describe on some very simple examples how you can setup your site without adding any additional extension except JoomFish core to it.

Question: Why did you developed an additional extension if this worked already with the core?
Answer: Because the organization of the content in your database will not be simple and our extension is simple ;-).

All examples are based on the Joomla sample data. The environment has three languages of which English is your default language, German is your secondary and Dutch the third language.

Language dependent articles controlled by menu items

A typical scenario is to link one article directly from your menu. This is done e.g. for the menu item "Joomla overview" which links to an article called "Joomla Overview. We can easily translate this in order to provide the same information in all three languages. Now let's say that in German the Joomla Overview must be completely different and actually we don't like to translate it as this might only confuse the translators. What we like is to have a new article that is linked if you press the same menu for this language.

What we need to do is a very simple change in the translation of your menu in order to link to a different article in your system. In order to make this happen the following steps are necessary:

1. Go to your article manager and create a second article for the German Joomla Overview. We call this article: Joomla in Deutschland  With this new article we have a second version of our content that we can now use to redirect our menu to it.
2. The second step is to translate our menu. This is when we go to the menu manager and select the menu in which the link is defined. In our case this is the "mainmenu". If you browsed the list of menus you check the checkbox in-front of the item "Joomla overview" and use the direct translation module (in your status bar next to the preview) to go directly to the translation of this item for the language German (Just select German and a modal window will open with the translation dialog). What you will see is your translation of this menu item. Now scroll down to the very end of the page and use the "select" function to choose the new article we like to link to.
3. The result can be viewed now in your website. If you click on the "Joomla overview" in English you will see the original. In Dutch you will see the translation and in German you will see the new article.

Different articles in blogs or lists

The second possibility is very similar in principle. In this case we like to have different articles based on a category or section. In this case you do basically the same thing like above only that the parameter you change in the menu is not the link to the article but to the category. Your structure within your CMS would look like:

• Section with your content
  • Category for content with English
  • Category for content with German
  • Category for content with Dutch

With changing the link of your menu from the general "English category" to a different category you can easily control having different articles present within the different languages. As there are real different articles in all these languages there is no need to translate anything except the menu with Joomfish.