We know that content management system (CMS) is an application to manage the content – adding, editing, deleting, modifying, organizing, maintaining, and publishing the content on the website. But what if you are planning for multilingual sites and have to manage the content in multiple languages? SharePoint 2013 have features that enable users to view sites in their preferred language.
The content management of a multilingual website in SharePoint 2013 allows for the following-
- Content made available to the users in more than one language.
- Create, manage and read content in different languages.
- Install language packs to create multilingual sites.
Here in this blog, we will discuss the content management of an Arabic website in SharePoint 2013
Basic Approach
Basic approach of the content management process is same for both English and Arabic websites, but UI of the website pages and the internal pages of the SharePoint would be mirrored. The process and pages in Arabic language would be same, but the language and options/links/icons are placed as mirror of the English pages. Let us see how the process works for Arabic language.
Open the Site Contents libraries
- Login as admin, the site contents libraries will open up where you can see the libraries folder.
- Go to the Pages folder where you can create a new HTML page.
- Add a web part, or if the page is available in Pages list then edit the page and upload the content.
Site Contents page contains images, documents and other apps to hold particular content types.
Create a new HTML page
In Pages list libraries, there is a FILES tab
- Click on the FILES tab.
- Click on the New Documents option as shown in the screenshot.
- Select Page option which is given as the first option in the drop-down.
- Click on Page option it will open a Create Page form.
- Fill the Title, Description and URL Name.
- Select the page layout.
- Click Create.
The newly created HTML page ‘Test-Page’ will be displayed in the list of pages, as shown below:
Open page in edit mode
In Page list, do the following:
- Click on the HTML page that needs to be edited.
- After opening the page it will show the Edit option as shown in the below screenshot.
- Click on the Edit option to view the page in edit mode.
- Click on edit icon to open the HTML editor.
Upload HTML code
In the edit mode, perform the following steps:
- Click on Edit icon to open the HTML editor pop-up.
- Write the HTML coding in the editor and click on OK button.
- The content can be viewed in the preview page to check if the uploaded content is displayed as intended or not.
- If any changes are required to be made, then repeat the process for editing.
Check-In and approve the page
If the uploaded content looks fine, then check-in the page and approve it to display it on the web page.
- There is a check-in option in the edit mode.
- Click on Check-in button.
- You can also check-in by selecting the page, clicking on the three dots and selecting check-in option.
The other way to check-in could be:
- Go to the FILES tab and click on Check-In option.
- Click on Approve/Reject option.
- Select the page and click on Approve/Reject option.
How to publish images and documents on the website
SharePoint provides an image template that allow image file formats like JPG, JPEG, PNG, and documents template that allow MS documents, pdf files, etc. By using the URL path of the images and documents in HTML code, you can publish the images and documents on webpages. Give the path of the image which is saved in PublishingImage folder library. The HTML code can be written as:
After saving, check-in and approve, the web page looks like this:
Things to remember:Â
- English language displays in LTR form (Left to Right) and Arabic language displays in RTL form (Right to Left), so it is difficult to add/edit the content in Arabic language. You can see the screenshot of the HTML code with Arabic content in the Share Point HTML editor.
- The best practice would be to copy all the Arabic content in any of the HTML editors available and edit it there, as in the HTML editor, the code would be shown in normal form as LTR. Thus, the content can be easily updated there and copied to the HTML editor of SharePoint 2013. Below is the screenshot of any other HTML editor where Arabic language and HTML code is visible left to right.
Similarly, content can be updated for any other language, to support users from different regions preferring different languages.
