Help with language customization please

[BSise]

Hi Wrensoft,

I'm a Pro Edition owner. I run a site called iLearnWords (http//:www.iLearnWords.com), which helps Russian speakers learn English, and English speakers learn Russian. I've already managed to set up my Zoom Search with categories, such that when a native Russian speaker does a search, they only get results in Russian, and when a native English speaker does a search, they only get results in English.

The thing I'm trying to fix is this: when a native Russian speaker does a search, the form at the top of the results page (e.g. "Search For", "Results Per Page", and "Match Any Search Words/All Search Words" is in English. I'd like it to be in Russian of course. Can you give me some direction on how to implement that?

I'm including some links below, so you can get a sense of what I'm talking about:

On the "Know English, Learn Russian" side of the site, you can search from the main hub, located here:
http://www.ilearnwords.com/eng_rus/er1_eng_rus_browse.html
...or from a wordpage, such as the one here:
http://www.ilearnwords.com/eng_rus/erw56_but_wordpage.html

On the "Know Russian, Learn English" side of the site, you can search from the main hub, located here:
http://www.ilearnwords.com/rus_eng/re1_rus_eng_browse.html
...or from a wordpage, such as the one here:
http://www.ilearnwords.com/rus_eng/rew10_good_wordpage.html

Congratulations again on a brilliant product, and thanks in advance for your help!

Best,

BSise

[Ray]

Interesting website!

First of all, it seems that you are using a single search function to cover both the English version of the site and the Russian version of the site. This method has some limitations, for one thing, it is, naturally the same search page, so making it change languages dynamically is not possible (unless you modify our search scripts significantly).

Second, it is probably not the most efficient or practical way of doing this: the categories feature is mainly useful if there are situations where you may want to search in BOTH categories, and in your cases, it would be rare for someone to want search results from both the "English" and "Russian" version of the site.

Normally, for multi-language websites, we recommend having multiple ZCFG configuration files, so you can index and create seperate search functions, one for each language.

This has previously been discussed in detail on the forum, here's a few threads of interest:
http://www.wrensoft.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1547#post5925
http://www.wrensoft.com/forum/showthread.php?t=1902

By doing this, you will have a search function that searches the Russian site only, and one that searches the English site only. They will need to be be hosted in different folders (eg. "/search_rus/search.php", and "/search_eng/search.php"). This is also more efficient in that the searches will be faster, and the script will not need to be filtering out all the Russian pages when searching english or vice versa.

And in addition these benefits, with this method, you can simply set your Russian search page to use the Russian language file. You can do this from the "Languages" tab of the Configuration window, to select "Russian.zlang" which is a pre-translated language file for all the text that appears on your search page, including "Search for", "Results per page", and all other related messages.

Hope that helps.

[BSise]

THANKS A MILLION Ray, I've got it all set up and it's working like a charm! Searches are definitely faster, and now I can language-customize the search results form, which will come in handy as I debut other languages on the site.

[BSise]

UPDATE: Please disregard the below post...I discovered that this problem is easily solvable by opening the basic overall zoom configuration, and indexing/uploading that. Thanks, BSise



Hi,

As I noted above, I implemented the changes Ray suggested, and they've worked very well for me. However, there's one issue that I haven't been able to figure out: sitemaps.

When I'm using multiple ZCFG configurations for the same site, each configuration is going to generate its own sitemap, correct? And the sitemap for a given configuration is only going to cover a _part_ of the site, correct? And the sitemap of each configuration is going to get uploaded to its respective folder within the site, NOT the highest level of the site (where Google wants it to be), right?

So you see my problem I think...Google won't know where to find my site's sitemap, and even if it could, there are multiple sitemaps to find, and each of them only covers part of the site.

Do you have any recommendations for how to use sitemaps with this type of multi-configuration Zoom setup?

Thanks!

BSise
http://www.iLearnWords.com