First I would like to thank you for your input. I indead Catalook has multiple languages and pictures (which is very shortly explained in the manual). However, there is only once price for all languages; so you cannot have price differentiation between countries. Installing a store for every country would be an option, but cumbersome and doubling a lot of data (and its exchange).
The multi-portal idea indeed might not work because of the portal boundary. But why not add a table to tell which portals may use the store and with what language to go over the portal boundaries? The main portal maintenances the product chart, prices and languages. So some tailor made work is not to be avoided this way.
Back to the multi-portal issue. Disadvantage is the maintenance as Erik says. However, nice thing is that you can customize for each country without having to set hidding on/off for modules you don't want to show in some countries. The first country you export as an template and after importing you have to translate all other portals. Advantage is that you can define domain.nl as a Dutch default language and domain.de as a German default language by adding them to the port aliases respectively. Advantage is that the search function work locally and does not show up other languages. So a brand name Mercedes will show up which German text only and without other European sentences. I read something on Apollo-Software's site (Erik's) about adding a search function tackling this issue.
Also the site logging will put all languages together with localizers because the tab’s are for every language the same…with child portals this won’t happen?
Concerning the login. Indeed you get an error if you want to register a duplicate, this means you cannot go from one portal to another. That somebody might accidentally enter some bodies else’s user + pwd. That is possible for many websites. That’s why banks have their devices that work in conjunction with your PIN and/or bank card. What I don't understand is why the child portal is in DNN if you cannot share between portals. In the DNN books and help file I did not found a good explanation about the differences so far. Can somebody explain? DNNmasters seems to have a multi-portal sharing also I believe. Does anybody have experience with it in multi-language sites or other application?
Lets' address another issue..search engines. They like DNN because of the user-friendly url's. But how do you promote your .com with French, German etc. locally on Google/ MSN Do Google, MSN etc. really distinguish between languages? And how are the title and descriptions in the search engines results? I would like to see the domain.com with English title and description, the domain.nl with Dutch and the domain.de with German. Does anybody have an example or experience with this? And what happens with nl.domain.com and de.domain.com and/ or domain.com/nl-nl and domain.com/de-de ?? And is there a difference between subdomains nl.domain.com and aliases (domain.com/nl)?
Thank you for your input so far.
Jelle