Converting the personal website in a multi-language site poses four distinct problems:

• Page Text,
• Database Structure regarding items such as albums and media, which must be modified to handle album names and media names and keywords in more than one language,
• “Loose Phrases” (such as: “Viewed x times” for a photo),
• Image Buttons with text such as: , which are language specific.

Regarding page text, the solution followed consists in storing all structured text (as opposed to loose phrases) in the database: Each page can have eight header fields and text nine fields which are displayed by “DataList” sections. To populate the pages, a Contents management page has been added to the Admin sections. These pages use the "FCKeditor" server control to format the text properly.
 

• You can find the first part (Page Text) here.
• You can find the second part (DataBase Structures) here.
• You can find the third part (Loose Strings) here.
• You can find the fourth part (Image Buttons) here.
• You can find the fifth part (Miscellaneous) here.
• You can find a demo of the DynamicButton here.

At the end of the articles, there is a download with the code. Note: You must be a registered user to have access to the download.

This site (written in C#) is based upon the Personal Website Starter Kit by Microsoft with modifications derived from the work by:

• Matt Gieselman (exif data for photographs) and the possibility to include movies in the albums,
• Jeremy Wadsworth (user management and blogs).

Moreover, I added a guestbook section and created a database driven, multi-language content management system for the site that will be activated soon. The site uses also a moderate amount of Ajax to improve the style, and to allow for partial refresh for instance pages that include passwords (which otherwise disappear after a postback: such as occurs when a first DropDown list determines the content of a second one) as in the registration page. I added paging to the photo albums pages. Even though the database in use is SQL Server 2005, the paging mechanism used functions also with SQL Server 2000, as it was developed for the latter.

I also developed three server controls: “Copyright Control”, “LastUpdate Control” and the recently added “DynamicButton Control”, which can be downloaded by registered users from the download section.