Multilanguage Welcome Page

[moelski]

Hi !

I need to add a starting page to my forum. It will display information about our software. The problem is we need it in 2 languages German and English.

Is there any way to detect the browser location / language and show a german or english welcome page? Maybe with a little bit of JavaScript?

This is not about switching the whole Forum language. I need only a detection for the Welcome Page.

Greetings
Dominik Schmidt

 

[DragonFlames]

I run a Web design business and for many years we operated around 35 different country/language Web sites for a large travel related outfit.

The way we did it was to have each site on its own domain. So xyz.de for German and xyz.co.uk for the UK, for example.

If you had your German page on a German domain you could advertise it to Germans and all might work out fine. The same goes for the English customers going to the .co.uk site. You could also have the option to change sites/languages somewhere like top right on that opening page.

You'd then link both to your forums and so on which could be on any suitable domain. Perhaps xyz.com. It would also allow you to site German language forums on the German site if you ever needed to do that sort of thing. Also shops or other items if ever needed.

Just a thought. Some sites do try and work out country info and use that as you mention. I've not found that great myself, and even now some large firms who try that seem to show me their US site, and products I can't buy and other US only material that does not actually apply to me.

Another advantage is that you have the main domains for your chosen name. It is very annoying to get xyz.com and aim at getting German interest only to find someone else registers xyz.de

I hope the thoughts are useful. If not please just ignore them.

Steve

 

[moelski]

Hi Steve,

you are rigth ... having multiple doains is one solution. But we have (and want) only one Domain. So this solution will not work for us.

The only thing we Need is:

• User loads Forum
• Forum / Script detects language of the browser / System
• Welcome page is shown in german (German browser / system) or english (the rest of the world)

Anyway tx for your suggestion.

Dominik

 

[DragonFlames]

Dominik,

I hope someone gives the answer you seek. I can see that a Google search shows lots of ideas.

Doing this automatically may have downsides, like when folks travel or live/work abroad or whatever, often they may be on the wrong browser or IP address for whatever system you setup.

That commercial travel site I mentioned went from being run from a bedroom to having large offices all over the World and to being worth hundreds of millions of pounds. If they had used one domain I suspect they might still be in the one bedroom. With non commercial sites the aim is to keep costs low of course and I totally understand that. Even my humble hobby forum site has many domains pointing at it mind you.

Xenforo has lots of great stuff built in and the option to show a notice based on browser language seems to be in there with its "User is browsing with the following language: " option. I don't know if that can be of any use to you as I have not used it.

Steve