Requirements, tips etc?

[RebirthSephiroth]

I plan to start a new forum which will be cross-language (English, Japanese, others) and wanted to know if anyone had any tips on doing this.

Does the database need to have a certain collation? Is there anything specific I need to do aside from install the language packs? Any tips on organizing the forum for cross-language?

I've only dealt with single language forums before. Thanks!

[Brf]

The default UTF-8 collation is supposed to be able to handle any of the language packs.

[RebirthSephiroth]

I've been working on the site and I've come across an issue.

From what I can tell, language defines like {NEW_MESSAGES} can't be used in forum names. Nor the board name, category names etc.

phpBB does not seem very friendly for multiple language support in this regard, or am I missing something?

[nuworld]

pbpbb does support multiple language.
I have a chinese/English site and works fine.

members can post in English or in Chinese.
See my sig below for link to site.

[RebirthSephiroth]

Yes, I know phpBB supports multi-language. That is not what I was asking.

But it seems to not support multi-language that well, see my last post.

To illustrate the problem using your board as an example, I visit this section as an English user: http://www.chinasafehaven.com/viewforum.php?f=11
But now I don't know what forum section I'm on...

Board index » 网站信息 » 指南和规则

[nuworld]

Ok,I understand.
Still it will work.
At first i had both english and chinese in the forum topic.
I just deleted.

It's easy to change back in my ACP.
I would just edit the forum topic and add the english translation together with the Chinese all on the same line.

Also this is going to be a problem for ya unless you can read and speak the languages you want to use.

I'm a U.S. citizen but my wife is fron china.
So as you can see, I have the best of both worlds and a great teacher.
I can read and speak both languages.

[RebirthSephiroth]

I would just edit the forum topic and add the english translation together with the Chinese all on the same line.

Yes, I considered that.

But it doesn't really work when you have 4+ different languages being used on a forum. That's what I will have.

[nuworld]

Four!!
Yes that could create a problem!
It would make for very large topic titles.

[nuworld]

You could always get four moderators that speak each language.

[ric323]

phpBB is not designed to switch forum/category titles when a user switches languages, just the messages output by phpBB itself.
You could try posting in the MOD Requests forum, describing exactly how you would like this to work.
It would be a lot of work though, multiple fields would have to be created in the database for every forum title to hold each language version.

By the way, if these users can't read the forum titles, how are they going to read the posts, which will be posted in single languages also? Maybe you would be better off using Categories to split your board into individual language sections.

[RebirthSephiroth]

By the way, if these users can't read the forum titles, how are they going to read the posts, which will be posted in single languages also?

In a nutshell, posts won't be in a single language.

Maybe you would be better off using Categories to split your board into individual language sections.

That doesn't really work for what I'm doing. The board I'm working on will be for the MMOs Final Fantasy 11 and Final Fantasy 14. Those games are cross-region and cross-platform, which means Japanese users play with English users etc. If I split the board per language, what is the point of even having the board? It would be like a step down from the game.