This is along the lines of my feature request here:

http://www.catalooksupport.com/CatalookForum/tabid/38/ptid/513/threadid/673/forumtype/posts/Default.aspx

For months I've been struggling to come up with a reasonable, "easy" solution to do this but the best I can think of is to run a separate Portal for each locale (probably Childs - not sure I this may really help much with content or if it makes little difference).

I have this problem with 2 businesses and websites I have.  Both deal in different currencies, different countries - in a true sense... not simply in dealing with other locales but also within the locales (eg. banking etc is also in different locales).

CATALooK (and DNN) really doesn't seem geared up to handle this too well so any thought in how I should go about doing this would be great.

To give an idea of the issues...

One business is manufacturing, wholesale and retail sales.  In different locales slightly different RRPs need to be set, for retailers and different tax rates.

CATALooK is forcing me to work in a single currency when PayPal can actually accept payments in different currencies and the customers also prefer to work in their own currencies which we can accommodate 'offline'.

I really would like to control the prices for each locale, also shipping rates and so on... otherwise we can't even fix rates due to having to work with exchange rates when we just don't actually need to do so.

I have bank accounts in 3 different countries at the moment, plus some of those are also foreign currency accounts... so, am I being forced towards a single currency... or is it better to create all separate Portals for the website?

If separate Portals, all Child's of a single Parent... is there any way to share content (ie. Products, Contact Us form etc)?

I am currently using MagicContent for the multi-locale, and people can choose a flag to switch locales.

Is the way to go to look at them all as completely separate websites, where the flag then points to a different Portal?

Does it then need each flag on each page to link to the same page in the other Portal otherwise it will keep returning to the Home Page?

And the main 'www.' parent page - how will this determine the language, or does it simple link to which langauge (a bit like the www.wikipedia.com)?

How do most large, true multi-locale businesses and websites go about this?

Thanks

David,

Child portals are truely separated from parent with dedicated users and files, i.e. this is only a valid option if your site will have different content per child and/or different target groups.

Otherwise I suggest to have a look at multilingual extensions, e.g. EALO or pagelocalization for translationg page attributes in the skin (including menu and breadcrumb) and ML modules like Magic Content from DNN Forge, MLHTML, MMLinks, ... there are already hundreds of sites using this successfully.

AFAIK this should also work with CataLook, but I don't have personal experiences with it.

Hi David,

sorry, I am not that firm with cataLook - you should forward your questions to their support, AFAIK it has more options and features you may be aware from the UI.

Regarding other modules there are MLSurvey, MLAnnouncements and MLAdvAnnouncements from Apollo, MMLinks from Locopon, MagicNews and MagicLinks from Portalfabrik.net and for sure others like we (www.deutschnetnuke.de) are providing a module for setting up user defined tables and forms in ML portals.