Joomla! is an open-source CMS licensed under GNU/GPL license. Due to its easy-to-use and reliability, its popularity is skyrocketing in the past few years. However, Joomla! 1.0.x and 1.5.x are not designed to be a multilingual CMS, and that has been their one big disadvantage in this world of global communication.
Fortunately, with the release of Joom!Fish, it has become possible to create multilingual Web sites with the combination of Joomla! and Joom!Fish. This site is devoted to collect and document various experiences of building multilingual sites with those dynamo duo.
With the release of Joomla! 2.5 and Joomla! 3.x, we got the multilingual support inside Joomla! system. However, it still seems to lack a convenient and flexible mechanism to setup and build a multilingual web site. Sadly an once popular multilingual extension, Joom!Fish, also became defunct during the transition from Joomla! 2.5 to Joomla! 3.x.
With Joom!Fish project dead, Joomla! community quickly responded with spin-off projects. One of them is FaLang, which currently supports Joomla! 2.5 and 3.x. FaLang essentially is a directly fork from Joom!Fish project, and uses the same design, mechanism and structure as in Joom!Fish. That makes migrating from Joom!Fish to FaLang more or less straight-forward.
This web site, at the beginning, was built with Joomla! 1.0.x + Joom!Fish 1.x. Later we upgraded it to Joomla! 1.5 + Joom!Fish 2.x. Because Joomla! 1.5 reached end-of-life status, we again upgraded this site to Joomla! 2.5 but with FaLang 1.3 due to the end of Joom!Fish.
The current web site is running on Joomla! 3 + FaLang 1.4.x. We will continue to research for better multilingual solutions, preferably one using the built-in multilingual capability in Joomla!.
Welcome to Joomla! 3 Laboratory.