## Welcome to Joom!Fish - your multilingual content manager for Joomla!

## Where do we start? Ever ask yourself how you can create a multi-language web site without copying the whole Joomla tables? The Joom!Fish is one of the possible answers. The Joom!Fish components supports you managing all your content translations, even the content of all the components/modules, in your web site. The component is so flexible that you can easily add new components and after that translate the new generated content. ## What do we understand as a content? If we speak about content, we mean any text or other information that is stored in one of the tables the Joomla Open Server provides. There are some text information, like the text of some links, which are stored in system wide language files. These files give you an easy change to switch your site between different languages. But the news, articles or other content you are creating is only in the language you write it :-(. The Joom!Fish is a solution to help you translating this content ;-) so that your site gets really multi-lingual. Each definition of dynamic content we call component elements. ## What does the component for you? We didn't wanted to create a machine translation or other computer based translation method. The aim is to support the translation process, which you will have in a bit bigger enviornment. At the moment you have some external editors which create new content for you, someone has to have control over the translation. With the Joom!Fish this person can check all content to find not yet translated items, see recently changed items or just manage the supported languages. Based on this your person in charge can translate the content items whenever he/she wants and also with any technique it is preferred. ## How does it work? Pretty easy. In the component menu you find the component configuration (available in the control panel toolbar) to change all the general settings of appearance and so on. This is the usual stuff. The main thing you have to configure here is for which languages you want to provide the translations. Just select the languages you want in the list. The second part is a bit more difficult. The definition of component elements is directly conntected to your database. That's why we decided not to make this configuration available in the Administrator! The administrator shows you in the "Configuration of content's" all installed content element definitions. These definitions are hold in XML files which are stored in the subdirectory "contentelements" below your administration dir of Joom!Fish. If you wish you add a new content or change existing once you have to modify the XML files, which should not be to difficult. Most important here, you will find some nice possibilities to check if the XML files are pointing to the correct information ;-) If you add a new XML file for a not yet implemented component/module make sure you edit also the component/module PHP scripts. For the translation process you just use the "Translation" menu. There you will find a list of the content's in your database. After selecting a content you can easily work with the translation and store it to your database. That's it so far. Any ideas, problems and so on - just check out our forum Alex & Geraint