With a technical background, the client proposed an efficient solution which was to provide a html template to be multiplied for each language and altered manually.
Basically in this point we had to create 25 html files, versions of the same file for each language and maybe more if any other language will be added.
We considered that this approach will create issues if any of the page components will require modifications. And as any developer knows, there are a lot of stages and change requests and ideas to be applied until a project is over.
So the dev team’s choice was to use a template engine, to ease the content input and manipulation and last but not least to avoid doing the same change in 25 different files.
The MEZ GmbH (formerly know as EMEA Crafts business of UK headquartered Coats Group) is the leading supplier of textile craft products in Europe, with a history going back over 200 years.
Mez is a partner of Tremend through our long partnership with Coats Group. We implemented and integrated services with Drupal for their 3 CMSs (Schachenmayr US, UK and DE) and merged the 3 websites into a multi-lingual one.
Tremend could have delivered what client asked for. We could even build it smarter, and here, the obvious solution would have been using a backend solution (such as a php template engine like smarty, twig, etc).
But why not building it even more smarter? Due to the short deadline an idea came to mind, however: by using the handlebars framework, the code could be ran in a browser, updated by the customer himself with minimal CSS/HTML knowledge.
Development tools
So, in the end the result is what it matters: we have a multilingual landing page, using a base template to which we attach components based on each language requirements.
The content is served based on the domain extension using a javascript function to read it (e.g. http://stage.mezcrafts.de/, http://stage.mezcrafts.es/, http://stage.mezcrafts.pt/, http://stage.mezcrafts.it/, etc) and the client can edit the content and page structure in each language file. All js files are merged and minified through a grunt task to save bandwidth. Same thing happens with the less files, which are merged in a css file.