The Joom!Fish is your key for providing multilingual content to your visitors! International (i8n) portals, companies or projects require content in different languages and processes which help to keep track of the translations. The Joom!Fish extension for the CMS Joomla! does exactly this.

This example is based on a standard Joomla! 1.0 installation with the Joom!fish installed with one additional language. It is also important to understand that frontend translation is only supported for content and not for anything else.

The Joom!Fish component supports you with design and creation of multilingual websites.
This topic itself isn't that easy as the first impression you might have and so the handling of this component isn't that easy.

This tutorial helps you to do your first steps. Get your mainmenu links translated and with that gives you a basic understanding of the work process used by the Joom!fish.

It is important to understand that the Joom!Fish extension is not an automatic translation tool for your site. Automatic translations are fine to rough understand what a text says but you need expensive tools and still more experience to use them if you like to get a more readable or professional translation. Translation experts say: "You need to localize your content more than to translate it."

Now do not worry and get the Joom!Fish installed on your site and see that isn't hard to localize your site!

1. Step: Installation of the Joom!Fish

The Joom!Fish extension is a combined package of component, modules and plugins for Joomla!. The installation is fully automated and only requieres you to install the component.

After downloading the latest stable release (see download) you only need to go to the Administration of your site and Installers -> Components and upload your zip package.

Please make sure that prior the installation your webserver has access rights to all extensions directories. Speically check the /mambots/ subdirectorys as in some installation the access is not granted. In those cases the installation will fail.

After the installation is processed you need to finish your configuration with the following steps.

2. Step: Language installation

The first step is the installation of standard Joomla! language files. Those files can be found on the Joomla! extension website.
Please install all languages (there is no limit) you like to use within your site - using the Site -> Languages -> Install function.

3. Step: Language configuration

After you have done the language installation it is needed to activate the languages and give them a "natural" name and some other configuration values. This is done with the language configuration of the Joom!Fish (Components -> Joom!Fish -> Languanges).

First check: When you change the languages within the frontend (Solarflar template is patched) then all static text should change.
How to translate content?

After you are sure that the basic configuration of your site works for the static text translations let's try to translate dynamic content that is included in the database.

4. Step: Translation of information in the database

For the first simple test we try to translate the menu names in your website.
For this please go to the control panel and select the function Translation.
In this translation overview first select the language into which you like to translate. Then select the "content element" Menus. After you did that you get a list of all menus existing in the database.
With selection the menu type "mainmenu" you reduce the list to all menu items used within this menu definition. Please translate all the menu items by clicking on the title name. It is important that the translation is published (last column).

Second check: When you change the languages within the frontend then the menu should show your translated menu names.

5. Step: Translation of additional information

For all other dynamic content within your database the translation process is exactly as described in step 3. For 3rd party Joomla! extensions you might need to install additional content element files with the configuration.