As you've seen as we built this multilingual Web site, you've noticed that there
are a ton of steps that go into putting together a multilanguage Web site.
Lots and lots of little things, lots of steps that are very easy to forget, or
overlook along the way, and fortunately Joomla
has recognized that this might be a problem,
and one of the things that they've offered here in Joomla
in the core is an Administrator module that may help you debug where you have
forgotten a step along the way, or where a problem might be occurring,
and I'm going to show that to you now.
So if we go to Extensions > Module Manager, we'll need to flip over to the
Administrator module, so over here in the left column, pick Administrator from
the list, and these are all of the Administrator modules in the Web site.
We looked at these earlier with the Joomla version.
There is another module down here called Multilanguage status.
And if you click on this, as you see here, this is the module that will show the
status of the multilanguage parameters.
By default, this is set to show up in the status bar; that's the little gray bar
down here at the bottom of the Web site.
I'm going to go ahead and say Published, and I am going to say Save & Close.
Now that this module is published, down here in the footer of the Web site, you'll
see that I have a link here for Multilanguage Status, right in the very, very
bottom left-hand corner.
And if I click on this, this will report what's going on with my current Web site.
So it will tell me that the Language Filter Plugin is enabled, and that's one of
those steps that's small, and very easy to forget,
so that's a really helpful thing.
It will tell you how many Language Switcher modules you have published, and how
many default Home pages you have for your Web site.
So, how many default Home pages should you have?
Well, the answer for this Web site is three.
You need to have one homepage assigned to the language of All, and then one
homepage for each one of your languages.
So since I have two languages, and one homepage assigned to all, the total is three.
So this will tell you if you're missing one of those homepages for one of the
languages that you might be trying to support.
The grid down here at the bottom tells you whether you have the content
languages, the site languages, and the default home pages set up and in place.
Remember, the default home pages I just covered.
The content languages have to do with whether that dropdown is
configured correctly.
We did is right at the very beginning of this chapter, where we added Italian as
another language that would show up in the dropdowns that we see in categories,
and articles, and menus; it's where we assign the language for any one of those
pieces of information.
And then, of course, the site languages; that is, have you installed the
language packs for Joomla?
And we had installed Italian right at the very, very beginning of the chapter.
So this little box of information will tell you if you've missed any of those
major steps along the way.
If this is looking good, and you might still be having issues, you might go
through and check your content, check your categories, your articles, your menu
items, your modules, your template styles, and make sure that those are assigned
the correct languages, and that you have enough categories, articles, modules,
template styles, and so forth to go around for all of the content that you're
offering on the Web site.
So between this, and that double-check for all of your content, you should be
able to put together a multilingual Web site, and diagnose any problems that you
run into along the way.
Since I've already got my multilingual Web site running, and all of this stuff
is configured, I don't really need this module active right now, and in the
footer of my Web site.
So I'm going to go ahead and close this pop-up window, and then I'm going
unpublish the Multilanguage status option down here at the bottom.
But if you want to keep yours published and on, there's certainly no downside
to doing that.