Joomla! 1.5.x has native support for localization. However, no matter what language you choose during installation, you will get a default installation of Joomla! Web site in English. In order to get front end and back end interfaces displayed in your language, you will have to install language packs.

What if you can have a completely Chinese experience with Joomla! right from the installation to the sample Web site contents? Will it help you to envision a Web site built with Joomla! in Chinese? Since we have already the fully translated sample data for the defatul Joomla! installation as well as translation files provided by Joomla! Taiwan, we decided to answer those questions with a small patch to make Joomla! completely (well, almost) Chinese. (Download location is provided at the end of this article.)

When building a multilingual Web site with Joomla! 1.5.x, one often requires to translate language files used by Joomla! core, components, modules, plugins and templates into various languages. While it's not difficult to open the original language file and the translation language file side-by-side and do the translation, it's a rather tedious work to compare those files to figure out the changes. Also, when you have a whole set of language files to be translated, how can you be sure all of the translations have been completed without checking each file?

Luckily there is an administrator backend compenent called Translation Manager can help with all those problems. In this article we will present a brief introduction to this handy component.

After you installed the lastest release of Joomla! 1.5.x, one thing you might think about customizing is the copyright message that displayed at the bottom of your newly created Web site. While it's nice to give credit to the good people of Joomla! Project, you probably want to show there a copyright message for the contents you produce.

Joomla! 1.0.x and 1.5.x have a built-in feature that allows Web site visitors to generate PDF files from articles they are viewing. The feature works quite well with western languages, yet fails to create satisfactory PDF files for Asian languages, such as Chinese and Japanese. For Joomla! 1.0.x there exists patches to make it perform well with Asian languages. For instance, Joomla! Taiwan released localized Traditional Chinese Joomla! 1.0.x, which includes a properly working PDF generating subsystem.

Because Joomla! 1.5.x uses UTF-8 encoding and allows specifing the font used in generating PDF for different languages, it basically supports a wide variety of languages in its PDF feature. With correctly installed font metrics, script and font itself, Joomla! 1.5.x indeed can correctly create PDF files in Asian languages. However, there are still problems when it comes to support Asian languages.