In my case we needed to keep a lid on costs and just went with everything on the same droplet. There’s obviously added cost in this approach though and I suppose it’s debatable how much SEO benefit you’ll get. Don’t look at me like that!ĭigital Ocean lets you ’spin up’ droplets in different regions (New York, Amsterdam, Frankfurt etc…) so it can be beneficial from an SEO standpoint to have multiple droplets since you’ll be serving your localized sites from more regional IP addresses. I know, I know… I’ve tried virtual ’boxes’ but MAMP does a fine job, and I can’t stomach the learning curve of something like Vagrant just now. So that’s the setup I chose for Medics Away staging and live environments. Now we have our domains it’s time to setup our local, staging and live environments.Ī year or so ago I joined in the collective community leg-humping of Digital Ocean and ServerPilot, and I must say they’re really rather good. Also be aware that for legal reasons some TLDs require corporate or personal identification during registration, so have your passport handy. Not a major issue but it’s less than ideal and something you’ll need to explain to your client. It’s not easy to find a registrar that can register all your foreign domains though, so you’ll probably wind up with your domains scattered over two or three registrars. I’ve used Fasthosts for years, and more recently Namecheap and, and they’re fine. Now, registrars are like banks – they’re all shit. So before we did anything else we needed to register all our domains. But for various reasons we wanted each locale to have its’ own domain with native TLDs (e.g. The Craft docs use different URLs in their localization examples (e.g. Bob’s Translate plugin lets you do just that. That’s all fine but it’s still ’content’ in my opinion, so needs to be easily editable by the client and belongs in the CMS. Craft suggests using translation files for hard-coded things like button labels. One suggestion I have right off the bat is to get yourself a copy of Bob Olde Hampsink’s Translate plugin. Instead I’ll share my setup for anyone who’s new to this. There’s a decent guide in the Craft docs on setting up a localized site so I’m not going to dwell on that. Equally, the client seems to have had no trouble getting stuck into content translations for – in this instance – 6 languages. Having wrestled with this stuff in other CMS’ over the years I was really surprised how straightforward it was. Medics Away website by DesignKarma, available in multiple languages.įirst off I’d like to say what a delight it was to do a localized site in Craft. The website in question is a redesign of Medics Away (in last stages of development at writing but launching soon), and it will be available in English, French, Spanish, German, Italian and Swedish. There are a number of good approaches to implementing multi-environment localized sites in Craft, and I’d certainly like to hear from you if you have any suggested improvements. It’s just the way I did it this time around, and next time I may do it completely differently. Mostly for my own sake - so I can do this quicker/better next time around - but also for anyone else who might find it useful. So I’m nearing the end of my first real-life localized Craft CMS site, and thought I’d document the process a bit. Looks like this article is over a year old, so some of the technical solutions or opinions may be a bit outdated now.
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