The
SharePoint Server 2010 variations feature enables site administrators to make
the same information available to specific audiences across different sites by
maintaining customizable copies of the content from the source variation in
each target variation. Variations feature can be used to manage multilingual
sites and pages, when you provision a new SharePoint publishing site.
A
variation consists of a set of labels that is used to create a set of sites in
a site collection. For example, if you want four language variations of your
site, you must create four labels, one for each language. Then the labels are
instantiated as SharePoint publishing sites and the full set of labels in a
site collection is referred to as the Variations Hierarchy.
Steps
to Create Variations
1. From the Site
Collection Administration in the Site Settings, select Variations to set
variations settings.
2. Specify variation
home. To indicate the root site of the site collection, type a slash.
3.
From
the Site Collection Administration in the Site Settings, select Variation
labels. Use New Label option to create two labels, one for English and one for
French. Let’s use English site as the source site. The source site should be
the one where most of the new content enters the system. When creating the
source site it is possible to use our custom publishing template as the source
template. More information on how to bring our custom publishing template into
variations drop-down list can be found here.
Note: in order to
select French (or any language other than English) as a site template language,
you should install the correct language pack on the server. Language Packs for
SharePoint Server 2010 can be found here.
When installing language pack give special attention to install instructions,
you are required to run SharePoint configuration wizard and re-run the
SharePoint Products and Technologies Configuration Wizard with default
settings. Otherwise the language pack will not be installed properly.
4.
Once
done with creating labels, select Create Hierarchies option. It will invoke the
timer job “Variations Create Hierarchies Job Definition” and timer job will be
run based on its schedule.
5.
You
can check the timer job in Central Admin and if required, can change the
schedule temporarily to shorter time period (5 minutes) to test the variation
creation. Go to Monitoring -> Review job definitions and find “Variations
Create Hierarchies Job Definition” timer job of your web application.
If
the hierarchies created successfully, you can see it in the variation labels
listing. Also typing the site URL in browser will take you to the correct
variation site \en or \fr.
Custom
Publishing Site Templates
If
you are using a custom publishing site template and variation site hierarchy is
not getting created for sites other than English, following steps might help.
Make
sure you have created webtemp files for each of the language that you create variation
labels. Webtemp files reside in the TEMPLATE folder of the 14 hive, inside sub-folders created as LocaleID\XML
So
the site difinition structure will look like this.
SharePointProjectItem.spdata
file of the site definition will look like this.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<ProjectItem Type="Microsoft.VisualStudio.SharePoint.SiteDefinition" SupportedTrustLevels="FullTrust" SupportedDeploymentScopes="Package" xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/2010/SharePointTools/SharePointProjectItemModel">
<Files>
<ProjectItemFile Source="1033\webtemp_DEPortal.xml" Target="1033\xml\" Type="TemplateFile" />
<ProjectItemFile Source="1034\webtemp_DEPortal.xml" Target="1034\xml\" Type="TemplateFile" />
<ProjectItemFile Source="1036\webtemp_DEPortal.xml" Target="1036\xml\" Type="TemplateFile" />
<ProjectItemFile Source="DEPortalWebManifest.xml"
Target="SiteTemplates\WebManifest\" Type="TemplateFile" />
</Files>
</ProjectItem>
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