Ideas for multi-lingual / multi-site solution ?

Hi there,

I am in the process of looking at the design for a site that caters for both English/Chinese users. I have chosen punBB due to its lack of bloat, good performance, flexibility and general high quality of coding.

I have a question about the best way to architect such a solution, and have come up with a number of ideas. Assume that the English/Chinese sites can be separated (i.e. no 'real' requirement for cross-site users - but would be nice for users to be shared for possible future site additions), and they would be hosted on the same domain (either separated by folders 'domain/en/' 'domain/cn/' or sub-domain 'en.domain' 'cn.domain').

** Single install of punBB using UTF-8 to allow posts in both language. Not ideal due to both language's being displayed on the same page. This one is rejected !

** Separate install of punBB (using separate language packs), with separate databases and users. May increase the manual admin overhead, but also minimises the changes required to core punBB code, aiding upgrades, etc. I like this option for its simplicity, but it does separate the sites a lot, and it would be good to have some user commonality between the two.

** Separate install of punBB (using separate language packs), with a single database and single user table. The database would use different prefixes to allow it in the same schema, but both punBB instances would point to the single user tables, perhaps by changing the config of the second site to point to the user tables of the first. Is this technically possible with punBB ? I have developed such a solution using phpBB, but found significant issues with their cookie management, and the overall 'bloat' of phpBB was not to my liking. This would also allow different themes/css to be used.

I am pretty new to this, so am looking for help with any other options that could be available that could allow such a solution, but without resulting in too many changes to the core code, as I would like to increase the ability to perform upgrades, etc.

Cheers, Ian