multinational and multilingual blueprint and site structure advice

[albena_georgiev]

Dear people,

I  am looking for the best way to structure a multinational  & multilingual website in AEM.
These are the main requirements:

1. Each country website has its own content in its own language. There are more than 60 country websites. There is almost no sharing of content among the country websites; For example, each country has its own list of products and services;
2. The structure and look and feel of the country websites should be the same and defined by the blueprint;
3. The templates for creating certain types of pages, as well as the forms should be globally defined & maintained;
4. There are country websites that support more than one language

What would be the best way to structure this in AEM? Any help would be much appreciated.

Thank you and have a great holidays as well.
Albena 

[Lokesh_Shivalingaiah]

You can have the below structure

<app name>

     <Country Code>

            <language code>

ex:

abc 

US

en - (Define your blueprint at this level so that you can use the same across the other country sites)

          page1

          page 2

es

fr

CA (Using the Blueprint of US)

en

In this way you can have the same look and feel across the countries and use the same templates and have multiple languages for each Country.

Thanks,

bsloki

[Mshaji · Accepted solution]

Geometrixx demo site is a good example for creating multi-lingual and multinational site. Design Structure for this site is a perfect example that demonstrates how these sites should be laid out.

If you have more than one language for countries,  you can use <language-code>_<country-code>. Example: en_GB in the structure.

Once you have defined blue print you can use MSM features to mimic the layout for same look and feel.

[albena_georgiev]

Thank you both for the great suggestions.
Because most of the countries have 1 language and some have 2 I would go for this structure instead of putting the language in a separate sub folder. Would this be maintainable?

<app name>
              en_GB
                             page1
                             page2
              fr_BE  /Belgium supports 2 languages
              nl_BE
              cn_CN
…

Furthermore, 90% of the content will not be shared among the countries, except for the countries supporting 2 languages. However, the structure and the templates need to be part of the blueprint. So, is it better to use a country site en_GB as a blueprint or create no country (master) blueprint structure as follows:

<app name>
     <app blueprint>
             page1
             page2                              

    en_GB
    fr_BE  /Belgium supports 2 languages, so here we need translation of the same content
    nl_BE
    cn_CN
...

Thanks again for your help!!!!

[Jörg_Hoh]

Hi,

when you create the content structure, I would opt for a rather deep than wide tree. So I would recommend to put the country not on the same level as the language. The reasons for me are

• MSM (obviously)
• Access control (the same people are responsible for multiple languages)
• Settings (if you have site settings, which are per country and not per language)

For these reasons I would not merge country and language information into a single node.

kind regards,
Jörg

[Lokesh_Shivalingaiah]

Albena,

Definitely you can go with the structure you have mentioned but in case, if you need to extend to multiple languages for each country in future, then it might be difficult.

Regarding Blueprint, you can create a blue print as you have mentioned

Regards,

bsloki