Quick & Helpful Tips for Joomla! International Edition

Sitename & Site-Meta Switching

You may want to have a different site name and site meta description depending on which language the user is using. This is easy in JIE and simply requires a modification to the frontend language pack. In the administrator interface go to Site->Language Manager->Site Languages then check the language you wish to edit and click Edit. Then edit the following lines:

 
define('_SITENAME', 'Your Sitename for this language goes here');
define('_METADESC', 'Your Meta description for this language goes here');
define('_METAKEYS', 'Your Meta Keywords for this language goes here');

If you leave these variables blank, the the default name, meta description and meta keywords will be used from the Global Configuration. This way you can create different sitenames for different languages.

Language Sensitive Modules

With Joomla! International Edition it is possible to display only certain modules for certain languages (when you use Joom!Fish for frontend language switching). For an example we may want to have a menu module for English users and a different module for Spanish users. This is accomplished using a parameter in the module called Module Class Suffix. Normally this parameter is used to change the CSS class of the module. It works the same way in JIE but is extended so that you can specify which language the module should display in. For example I have a module that I want displayed only in Spanish, I would add ~spanish to the end of the module class suffix. You can use any language for this as long as you put the ~ character before it. If there is no language, then the module will always be displayed 

• Module Class Suffix: ~spanish (displays only on Spanish language pages)
  
• Module Class Suffix: -notitle~spanish (displays only on Spanish language pages)
• Module Class Suffix: -notitle (displays on all pages)
• Module Class Suffix: ~english(displays only on English language pages)

UTF-8 Usernames and Passwords

We haven't fully tested this feature yet, but from our intial analysis there doesn't seem to be any problem having usernames and passwords with UTF-8 characters.

Language Sensitive Help

In order to use the language sensitive help you need to have the URL of the help server. You should be able to find these URLs and we hope to have a list of them sometime in the future. In order to change the help server, you need to edit the file located in language\language_name\admin.language.php and edit the following line:

 
define('_ADM_HELP_SERVER_URL', 'http://your_help_server_url_here');