Variations – The White Pages

I recently encountered a relatively puzzling circumstance on a multilingual blog site. In this scenario, the customer was using the SharePoint blog as part of their public facing web site and while the English site was working fine, the French site was not. More accurately, I should state that it wasn’t working for me, but I’ll get to that shortly.

For the most part, the French blog site was working. The posts showed up on the main page, and could be accessed. However, if you opened up the source list for the posts, either by using “All Content” or by selecting “Manage Posts”, the posts would appear, but clicking on them would result in the error “Page not found – The page you’re looking for does not exist”.

The first clue was that although the list is named “posts”, the site itself is a French site, so the actual list name is “Billets” as seen below.

This difference is a feature of SharePoint 2013, and it happens because this is a multilingual site that has been enabled for multiple language display. In my case, my user profile identifies my preferred language as English, and SharePoint automatically translates all system generated text into English. With this feature, an English system administrator can easily navigate a French site because pages like system settings are automatically translated.

Unfortunately, in the case of the blog site, the translation system gets a little overzealous. Clicking on one of the blog posts from the system view results in the error mentioned above. Why is there an error? All we need to do is to look at the URL to discover the reason.

As you can see, the list name requested is “Posts” but we know that the actual name is “Billets”. The URL itself is being translated for me. So how do we avoid this problem?

As good as the translation system is, it’s not worth the error, so we need to turn it off for this site. Doing so is as simple as turning it on. From the Site settings page, select “Language settings” under the Site Administration section.

From there, simply deselect all alternate languages, and automatic translation will no longer be performed.

Once this is done, the URL will no longer be translated, and opening posts will work. You will now need to navigate the site settings in a different language, and know that “Language settings” is the same as “Paramètres linguistiques”, but most SharePoint admins can navigate here with their eyes closed anyway.

I hope that this helps.

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If you’ve ever worked with multiple language packs for SharePoint, you’ll know that after you add a language pack to a farm, you’ll have the option of selecting a base language for any new site that is created.

The default language will be that of the site collection, but all installed language packs will be available. All of the system generated text in that site will be presented in the language of the site. This has been true since SharePoint 2007. SharePoint 2010 introduced the MUI (Multilingual User Interface), which, if configured, allowed the user to switch the language of the system generated text. SharePoint 2013 retains the MUI, but the way it is used has changed. However, all versions of SharePoint share a common limitation.

Once a site is created, its language cannot be changed. No way, no how. Well, at least not in any supported way.

I recently encountered a situation where a customer wanted to move their Internet facing site to SharePoint 2013. It was a multilingual site that used variations. However, when it was originally set up, no language packs had been installed. Both variation sites (English and French) were based on English. Although the content in the French variation site was in French, all of the system text was in English. This obviously needed to be corrected as any system text would pop up in English. A significant investment had been made into the content, so re-creation wasn’t our first choice.

An attempt was made to use the export function (using stsadm –o export – I’m old school). While the content exported just fine, it couldn’t be imported into a newly created French site, because the source site was in English. A little bit of web searching found Mirjam’s Van Olst’s article from 2008 on how to change a site’s language. This article was written for SharePoint 2007, and described how the content database could be directly updated to change the language for one or many sites.

Unfortunately, as Mirjam correctly points out, monkeying with the content database voids your warranty, and leaves SharePoint in an unsupported state. She also points out that this approach doesn’t work well for publishing sites, which is what we were dealing with. Our goal was to wind up with a clean system, so this wasn’t going to work for us, at least not as a complete solution.

The beauty of this approach however is that if you’re willing to compromise your content database temporarily, you can literally change the language of the site. Using this approach, we were able to set the language to 1036 (French) for all sites, export the French variation, and then change it back. Now technically, we’ve edited the content database, and rendered it unsupported. However, this doesn’t matter, as we wanted to import the content into new (French) variation site in a new, untouched content database,

This approach works, and unless I’m mistaken, should be totally supported. To be clear the steps taken are:

Back up the source content database (always a good idea)
Open SQL Server Management Studio, Connect to the content database in question , and create a new query. Any of Mirjam’s update statements would work, but this one is easiest
```
UPDATE dbo.Webs SET Language = 1036
```
Immediately export the site and all subsites. In my case I used stsadm, but of course PowerShell can be used, as can Central Administration.
```
stsadm-o export –url http://xxxx.xxxx.xxx/fr-ca –filename frenchsite 
```
Once complete, set the source site back to English
```
UPDATE dbo.Webs SET Language = 1033
```
Create a new site collection in NEW content database. Create the destination site using French (or allow the variations system to create it)
Import into the destination French site
```
stsadm -o import -url http://yyy.yyyy.yyy/fr-ca -filename frenchsite.cmp
```

The source content is successfully migrated into the destination site. Now, technically, because the source database has been directly modified, it’s in an unsupported state, and should be discarded. However, I have yet to see any ill effects. The good news is that the destination content database is pristine, and therefore this approach should be supported.

While we technically haven’t changed the language for an existing site, we have achieved the goal of getting the French language content into a proper French language SharePoint site.

Tag: Variations

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