Drupal multilingual

Hi,I bought a domain and started thinking which CMS to use to develop my site which is mainly about teaching foreign languages, online for free.

After some experience with Wordpress, I decided to go for Drupal, because it has the multilingual functionality in it's core.I found a great article written by a hungarian (Gábor Hojtsy) (I don't know if I can use the direct link) which was very helpful, but even with that it's still difficult to get to a fully fledged website.

The temese are not that easy translatable, I tried three themes and none of theme had multilingual support.
Other modules neither have multilingual support.


And the biggest difficulty that I have is that I wanted to make something like a test page for each user to check his level of a particular foreign language, meaning a few fields with a few answers, maybe one audio/video, and then multiple choice answers.
This in ASP PHP would be done fairly easy, but in Drupal you need to know the Drupal API...
I found the Quiz module , but it's not functional for Drupal 7, has hundreds of bugs...

So I was wondering, would it be easier to develop a multilingual site directly in PHP? without any CMS?

And some other interesting part, was that I have the Drupal Language switcher in the header, but I wanted to hide the title "Languages", I explored I think 2-3 days, including questions on the drupal forum, but it looks like I really need to enter in the core of Drupal,to be able to target the div of the Languages, to give it a particular class, to be able to hide it with CSS.

I have to say though that I respect the work of the developers that have worked on the Drupal CMS, it's a trumendous effort, and I guess most of them are volunteers.I understand that many other functionalities are there ready to be used with no line of code, but some other customisation that in a custom website would be done in minutes/hours takes much more in Drupal. I guess it's the price you have to pay for having of the functionality that comes out of the box with Drupal.

Can you please help me better understand all the advantages of Drupal, because I'm fairly new to Drupal, and I'm sure that I'm currently using around 20% of it's full functionality.

Thank you,jimmyy

 

Hi Jimmyy,

I read your post two times, very carefully word by word. Because I am very similar to you. You are doing what I was gonna do about 6 months ago.
well, first let me introduce myself. I am Arasp Kazemian, the C.E.O of eZaban (www.ezaban.com) which is the only and most comprehensive online language institute in Iran.

In the pas 5 years, we have been developing our online institute using different systems, Joomla is our main CMS, and we also use Moodle (but the databases of two CMS and LMSs are integrated into each other) so users who register our joomla website do not need to register in moodle website (which is our virtual university).

So the first question I have, why do you want to use drupal? why dont you use LMS systems? like moodle and .... ? I think you want to offer only language content, maybe your site is gonna be a website like livemocha.com if the answer is positive, you have done a great job for choosing Drupal .
I know that some big websites like livemocha and palabea use drupal system .

Maybe it is interesting for you to know that I am also moving from joomla to drupal, for now I am just investigating and testing everything, I want to know how drupal is compatible with moodle and I want to know how I can move my database into durpal.

For hundreds of reasons I can say joomla really sucks.

I do not recommend you to start from scratch and make a website with hard php coding.

My other question is your idea behind making such website, what is your business plan? how do you plan for making money if it is gonna be totally free.
my institute is not totally free but we want to offer some free educational part into it. as you know in order to teach languages, you need to work on 4 skills simultaneously, speaking and listening are where you are gonna have face big problems. And these two parts are the biggest weaknesses of some big websites like livemocha.
However on eZaban we have online classes (video conferencing system) which are integrated with our moodle and joomla system.
The market is great and we are making good money in Iran.

If you are interested, we can participate in your project to make it international.

I wish you luck and success,

 

Hi Arasp,I'm happy to hear that you are also working in the same direction.I checked a bit Moodle, but I'm thinking more to attract the visitors to the website by offering free lessons. Moodle, if I understood correctly is more based on a student - teacher approach whereas my model is more online lessons for everybody for free. I also find moodle interface quite unattractive.For the moment I do not need to record the evolution of a user, or to offer more targeted exercices.You also have to bear in mind, that I'm all alone. It's true that I speak and understand 5 languages, but I'm not the best at any of them. For me this is an oportunity to improve my language skills as well, because when you have to prepare the lessons you start understanding the real difficulties as well. for the moment I do not worry about making money, because I have a full time job, this is more like an ideea that I want to realise before I get to old. If it will ever turn into something serious, I was thinking of offering classes in the real life, and also services related to the country where the target language is spoken, services for foreigners for example. I think companies would be interested in placing their banners on such a website if they know they can target foreigners....All the best in your endeavour.

 

Hi Jimmy,

I agree that Moodle is not that much user friendly. but there is nothing wrong with offering free courses on moodle.
And if you also use online classes with whiteboards and lots of other features, you actually attract more and more people into it.
Moodle sounds to be difficult because it has numerous different features.

But if you want to make a website like Livemocha , I think drupal is a good decision.

 

I am also very difficult as it

 

It might seem that way, but truth is that it's not. You will end spending loads of more time. If you don't want any CMS then use framework like codeigniter or zend. Bare PHP is not a smart way to go.