What? Is not that simple as place a <href="index.php">Home</a> and you're done?

Yes and no... The Joomla routing engine is smart enough, to redirect all such above links to the default menu item in most cases. But using the core multi-language engine in Joomla 1.7+ has created a little-bit different situation. Let me explain!

Joomla supports out of the box the UTF-8 character encoding, so someone building a multilingual website should not have any problems using UTF-8 character encoding in his site. Right?

Yes and no, the CORE Joomla is problem free as I write this, but some non-core add-ons, templates - and yes, your own, home-cooked code can produce garbled output. Let's see why, and how we can fix it!

I'm a multilanguage guy, you might allready know that Living in a multilang environment, I use on daily basis at least 3 languages, and I have contributed to internationalization of many open source (and not only) software packages - so naturally I am in the multilanguage site development from the start.

If you use Joom!Fish to create a multi-language Joomla site and use sh404SEF to manage your SEF URL's you might have seen this problem:

When you are in one non-default language and click on the Home menu item (the default menu item, which should lead you to the default site page on that language) you are arriving on the default home page - in the default language, and not the default page in your active language!

Sometimes it is necessary to include specially formatted fields within a string to be translated. This usually happens where numbers are involved but can occur for dates and times or when precise formatting instructions are required.

Joomla is a truly international application and supports the translation of all strings contained within it. Templates are no exception on this. They are a bit neglected, but a little extra time spent here will ensure that the strings used in your templates are translatable will pay back - and will give you an edge over your competitors.