Adding languages

Introduction

This document describes how to add a new language that does not appear in the list of available languages in the Manage Website Languages function in Admin mode. This is useful when you want to add less commonly-used language and local combinations on an EPiServer CMS installation.

Adding a language to the list of available languages

EPiServer CMS takes the list of the languages that you can enable for a site from the languages that are installed on the host operating system. This can be a problem as the available languages can vary between different machines. The risk here is that if you have a language enabled in your EPiServer CMS database which is not installed on your target machine then EPiServer CMS will throw an exception on start-up, which will make the entire site go down.

If you want to add a new language to EPiServer CMS then you will have to install it on your operating system. This can be done via the CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder class in System.Globalization. This class allows you to create a new language from scratch or by copying it from an existing language, although you will have to run the code in the context of an Administrator account for it to work.

The code sample below shows how CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder can be used to create and register a new language based upon an existing language, in this case creating Hong Kong English (en-HK) from UK English (en-GB). Note that you will need a reference to sysglobl.dll in your project for this to compile.

public static void CreateCulture()
{
    //* Get the base culture and region information
    CultureInfo cultureInfo = new CultureInfo("en-GB");
    RegionInfo regionInfo = new RegionInfo(cultureInfo.Name);

    //* Create the a locale for en-HK
    CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder cultureAndRegionInfoBuilder = new CultureAndRegionInfoBuilder("en-HK", CultureAndRegionModifiers.None);

    //* Load the base culture and region information
    cultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.LoadDataFromCultureInfo(cultureInfo);
    cultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.LoadDataFromRegionInfo(regionInfo);

    //* Set the culture name
    cultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.CultureEnglishName = "English (Hong Kong)";
    cultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.CultureNativeName = "English (Hong Kong)";

    //* Register with your operating system
    cultureAndRegionInfoBuilder.Register();

}

Run the code, start EPiServer CMS, go to the Admin view, select Manage Website Languages from the Config tab, click Add Language and your new local combination will be ready to use.

Last updated: Feb 23, 2015