📖 Introduction
Welcome to our newest community update. In this edition we want to show you the versitlity of Flarum as a multi-language forum patform. Also - like you are already used to - we will share interesting updates on the Flarum ecosystem, including the newest plugin additions and active bountries. In Edition 4 of our community updates 2022 we featured a overview about push notifications and mobile app support. Feel free to skip back to this post in case you are interested. But now lets move on to our newest update.
🗣️ Multi-language in Flarum! What are the options?
Many message boards have a target audience speaking different languages. Support for multiple languages is, therefore, at the heart of much good software. But supporting different languages as variables for text does not make for a good multi-language community. Many extensions are available that help you customise your community for a truly multilingual experience. But before we go there, let's start with language support in Flarum first.
🌐 Flarum Lang
With the Flarum Language Project, we started to get more of the available translations under a common roof. Those languages are also available on Weblate. This web-based platform allows you to contribute to all available languages to get new extensions translated or improve translations. Of course existing or new languages are always welcome to join the project. All contributions are welcomed!
Find all 40 available languages on the GitHub Project. A big thank you needs to be sent to all the many language pack maintainers and contributors.
🧩 Extensions
While Flarum offers great support for different languages to be installed in one installation, there are many extensions out there that greatly improve the handling of multi-languages.
This extension allows one to assign a language to discussions, allowing one to filter content by language. There are many neat features like language auto-detect to assist users in finding what they are looking for.
Find out more on the extensions page.
This premium extension extends Flarum to add support for translating core features into different languages. This includes the Forum description as well as, most importantly, Tags. This allows users to change the Forum to the language of their desire completely.
Find out more on the extensions page.
Translate by @IanM
Another premium extension allows the automatic language detection and translation of discussions and posts. This allows users to easily view the complete content a multi-language has to offer and does not limit them to the languages they speak. Asides from the extension, a professional language translation service like Google Translate or DeepL is needed. Both offer free limits to get this started, though.
Find out more on the extensions page.
Other extensions
Of course, we also need to mention the FoF Linguist extension and the Translation Inspector, which are both useful tools to improve the languages of Flarum or modify them to the specific needs of your community.
🧪 Samples
Now one might argue that this is theoretically very nice but is there any bigger community out there using this in the real world? I am really happy to say yes! Also, this community has been highlighted in a previous community update already! You can read the interview of @Dany and visit the community.
📰 Other News
Flarum released Version 1.6, including the first two bounties successfully funded and implemented. Please also note that a critical security update has been released for affected version 1.5.x to 1.6.1. Work on the next version, 1.7 has already started.
Also on date of publishing this article there are currently different promotions running for Black Friday offering some big discounts on premium extensions worth checking out.
🏴☠️ Active Bounties:
🕸️ Extension Highlights
🏁 Final words
We hope you have liked this edition of “Community Updates”. Looking forward to your comments and ideas for future updates. We are going to pickup speed again and hope to see you soon on the next edition of Community Updates.
