Aditional languages in subdomains

resplence

Hi, I would like to maintain a forum about one subject (say, learning foreign languages), but to support multiple languages (naturally). How would I be able to have something like 'en.domain.com' for the english forum, 'es.domain.com' for the spanish forum, 'fr.domain.com' for the french forum and so on? Also: 1. Each subdomain would run under its own Language Pack ('en.domain.com' would be in english, but 'fr.domain.com' in french); 1. Each forum would be independent from one another, but ideally only one account would grant the user access to all forums/subdomains. So: a. Can this be accomplished with only one install? b. Or only by an individual brand new Vanilla installation under each subdomain? b i. In that case, can the user account expand across installations? Thanks. ps: and sorry for my english, I'm not a native speaker

Minisweeper

Are you aware of the Language Selector addon, and would this not sufficiently suit your needs?
Otherwise, I think it would probably be easiest to run this as 3 seperate forums all using the same user table. Achieving that is simple enough - do 3 seperate installations with each of them using a different database table prefix (it's a configuration setting), and then just point all 3 installations to a single user table (the user table is also a configuration setting).
There are a few discussions on here regarding doing the above, so I'd suggest you scan through them and see if you can work it out otherwise come back and ask slightly more in depth questions. I think you possibly could do what you want with a single vanilla install but a quick guess suggests it would be more hassle. That said i'm very tired and slightly drunk so i might be wrong...but i dont think i am.

p.s. your english is near perfect.

resplence

Thanks Minisweeper, that was quick :) I knew about the Language Selector addon, but it only changes the language in which the forum is presented. In my example, however, each subdomain would be about a different language ('en.domain.com' would be the forum for people learning english, and thus discussing in english, while 'fr.domain.com' would be for those learning french, so everyone would be speaking in french.), so it wouldn't really make sense to just translate the interface. I guess I could use this and just set each language section/subdomain as a category, but I'm afraid in the end (with "subcategories" like "english-help", "english-slangs" etc.), it will turn out to be too many categories. I think your method of doing separate forums is pretty spot-on, though. Vanilla is so light that space disk isn't really an issue. If the "point all 3 installations to a single user table" step works, that will be it. I should report on how it all worked out soon. Thanks! p.s.: you're too kind :)

Minisweeper

Oh right, well if you want each subdomain to have completely different content too then the seperate installations idea is the way to go.
The configuration settings you want to be aware of are:
$Configuration['DATABASE_TABLE_PREFIX'] = 'LUM_';
and
$DatabaseTables['User'] = 'LUM_User';
which need to go into the conf/settings.php and conf/database.php files respectively, on each of your forums. The easiest way to do it is to run an install, then manually change the prefix of the new database tables to, e.g, en_, and change the conf setting appropriately; then run another install and do the same as required. Then delete all but 1 of the user tables (doesnt really matter which), and use the $DatabaseTables['User'] = 'LUM_User'; setting of all forums to point at that single table.
There may be a few other things which need tweaking, and this is very much a barebones guideline, but that's the theory.

resplence

Wow, thanks a lot for the thorough guide. I can't wait to try it.