A Content Management System with Advanced Localization Features

Sulu’s internationalization and localization features provide everything you need to execute your global marketing strategy. Here’s what makes Sulu an excellent CMS with multi-language support.

Why Sulu

Every Localization Feature You Need

Brand consistency and performance

Be yourself in all languages.

Some WYSIWYG editors may cause inconsistencies in style or even break your layout. Sulu’s content templates are reusable across languages and allow translating and localizing content independently of design, helping you delivery brand consistency across languages.

Multilinguality is a core feature, not an afterthought
One consistent page tree across multiple languages
Multilingual category tree
Powerful caching

Efficiently spin up new locales

Speak to the world.

Content in Sulu can be translated to an unlimited number of languages or dialects. Make your site global by connecting with your audience in their own language.

Unlimited number of localizations, dialects, and languages (e.g. en, de, fr, or de-de, de-ch, de-at)
Adding a new localization is a simple configuration change by a developer
Reuse a field in different localizations by defining it as non-translatable
Language fallback: Get untranslated (rather than empty) text if a translation is missing

SEO and metadata

Be visible in search engines.

Ensure that users can find you with their favorite search engine. Poor search engine optimization (SEO) can reduce your traffic but getting it right can be challenging. Sulu supports you with dedicated SEO functionality and smart default settings.

Human-readable URLs
Language-specific metadata for multilingual SEO
Multilingual sitemaps are created automatically
Support for link tag with hreflang attribute to specify alternative languages
The canonical tag is set automatically
Multilingual meta information for reusable media assets

Target content based on locality and language

Embrace cultural differences by adapting your content.

Countries differ in culture and interests, not just language. Even the target group for a product can differ by country. Sulu helps you optimize translated content, even up to choosing a localized page layout, so you can tailor language-specific content beyond translation.

Freedom to localize URLs in your chosen format (domain.fr, domain.com/fr, fr.domain.com, …)
Change page template for different languages
Set different publish status (published or draft) per locale for the same content
Language-specific permissions

Translation workflow

Manage the translation process with ease.

Translations can become quite involved, especially when you connect your CMS to third-party agencies. Sulu supports the various stages of a translation process with shadow pages, ghost pages, XLIFF export, and more.

Create and edit pages in the localization of your choice
Copy content from another localization when creating a page
XLIFF export and import to exchange content with translation agencies
Shadow pages for defining fallbacks to other localizations where no translation exists
Ghost pages as a placeholder for yet-to-be-defined localizations

How to

Four Steps to Add a New Language to a Sulu Website

Add one line of XML to add a new language, and one more to set up the URL structure

Each locale is defined by a developer in XML. Sulu’s neatly organized approach keeps configuration out of the database, which makes it much easier to deploy in different environments and keep track of changes. It also simplifies exchanging data between different environments — a true time-saver when testing with real content.

Frontend developers can create a language switcher in Twig with one straightforward variable

Sulu passes all available localized URLs as the “localizations” variable. From there, developers can work with Twig — a mature, well supported templating language from the creator of the Symfony framework.

Editors start managing content

Once you’ve set up a language, Sulu’s intuitive administration interface has everything your editors need to manage multilingual content with ease, and work seamlessly across locales. They can define non-translatable fields, which is useful for content such as images that are not language-specific. Similarly, shadow pages offer fallbacks for when a piece of content doesn’t exist in one or more languages. Editors can store assets and snippets centrally and use them across webspaces and locales so they don’t have to duplicate content and maintain many copies.

See the page content at the correct URL

Once your locale is set up and your content entered, Sulu takes care of many details. These include canonical URLs — which can be set automatically or manually — and a sitemap showing all localization variants, so search engines index your site favourably. Web pages are rendered using the widely adopted, reliable Twig templating language for excellent developer experience and productivity.

For more details, have a look at our documentation