Serving content in multiple languages

Basic concepts

django CMS has a sophisticated multilingual capability. It is able to serve content in multiple languages, with fallbacks into other languages where translations have not been provided. It also has the facility for the user to set the preferred language and so on.

How django CMS determines the user’s preferred language

django CMS determines the user’s language the same way Django does it.

  • the language code prefix in the URL

  • the language set in the session

  • the language in the language cookie

  • the language that the browser says its user prefers

It uses the django built in capabilities for this.

By default no session and cookie are set. If you want to enable this use the cms.middleware.language.LanguageCookieMiddleware to set the cookie on every request.

How django CMS determines what language to serve

Once it has identified a user’s language, it will try to accommodate it using the languages set in CMS_LANGUAGES.

If fallbacks is set, and if the user’s preferred language is not available for that content, it will use the fallbacks specified for the language in CMS_LANGUAGES.

What django CMS shows in your menus

If hide_untranslated is True (the default) then pages that aren’t translated into the desired language will not appear in the menu.