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!

It's weird and scary - in a perfectly functioning Joomla site I installed one of my favourite components, Joom!Fish - remember, I'm the multilang guy - and all I got was a blank screen. Obviously, something gone south... but what?

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!

The sh404SEF component is a terrific tool for creating and maintaining SEF URL's for your Joomla site - and to make it more Google - and user - friendly, with one condition: to have a SEF plugin for your components already delivered to you with the sh404SEF or to find one ready-made on the web.

Luckily most of popular components are already covered by the component itself, or there are geeks on the net (like me) publishing the needed add-ons. One of notable exceptions is the popular form component, Chronoforms.

You might think, that this is an easy job, you just set up sh404SEF, and you're done! Maybe... but sometimes this might be really wrong. Especially if you have a multilingual site, and a properly built Joomla 1.7+ template.

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.

In a previous article about useful  PHP code snippets to conditionally add things to your template I allready listed couple of tricks, let's add a couple more to them!

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!

The Joomla ItemID-related management of modules is a powerful tool, but sometimes you need to show/hide parts of your site on two special cases not covered by this tool: when you need to show/hide things regardless of the active ItemID - for example on all detail listings page of a given component, or when you need to deal with a component which have poor support of ItemIDs - as VirtueMart, which is notoriously misbehaving in this regard.

Joomla Privacy tools suite is a welcome addition for all Joomla webmasters- especially for those in EU. GDPR regulations make this not only a desirable asset, but a must have item.

But what about multilingual sites? Looking to the configuration settings it is not obvius at all how you can use in your multilingual site properly.