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I have to agree. I'm planning to start a website regarding my language business. A multilingual site is mandatory in this business. The only reason why I haven't started this with squarespace yet is because of exactly that issue. I have to go with a standard cms which brings all it's disadvantages like constant administration and maintenance of the website. It's about time that Squarespace changes this situation.

I also hope this is addressed. I've come across some issues due to the language limitation.

I have to agree with all of the above. I have been using SS two years ago and stopped using it specifically for this purpose. Wanna rejoin now but obviously no change on this subject since then. :( I do not want to pay per language, it would be too expensive of a solution since I am thinking of using 6 languages minimum. Somebody from SS, please help us!!! At least, please let us know that the help is on the way...

I want to raise the issue with language versioning again as it seems to be neglected. We produce many multi-language sites and we love to use Squarespace. I am absolutely sure that a solution may be worked out as it will make the SQSP platform "THE ONE AND ONLY" for us.

How about adding an option for multiple versions of a post (let's say for 5$ extra per language). For instance writing a post in regular mode to be the same but to create an expanded mode for versions of a post or a page.

We tried with the selective display option but it becomes too complicated and too untidy to work with also we encountered some strange behavior with this option. Obviously something else must be elected.

Most CMS systems have Language support. Why not Squarespace. Obviously getting another account for each language is absurd.

Another option would be to offer a sub "Lite" account option to share the same storage and same domain mapping as the "Master" account for a somewhat smaller fee !!!! How about that - it may be an easier option.

For example (If Master/Lite option is elected):

www.somecustomdomain.com/en/ - for master account (English content)
www.somecustomdomain.com/ru/ - for sub (Lite) account (Russian content)
www.somecustomdomain.com/es/ - for sub (Lite) account (Spanish content)

Naturally the 3 above accounts will share Storage/Bandwith/Audience/Member limit of the Master account. For purposes of limiting abuse of the additional provisioning the "Domain Mapping" function can be limited to a single domain.

Or ... some sort of single sign-in with Lite sub-accounts to be worked from the same interface/account.

Sorry, I can't agree to the last post. I'm not willing to beg for such an option by even offering multiple solutions, just because I think SS is a great tool. It surely is but it also misses a feature which many cms' offer. And again, it's not acceptable to simply order two sites. I would need the 50$ version times 4 for my website. I can hire a good system for this money and install drupal on it. Sure, Drupal is a pain in the ass to set-up, but it's also very flexible and in my case much cheaper than SS.

You guys should really solve the language issue. You loose customers on that and I can't see that it is so hard to implement that the development costs wouldn't pay off by the extra customers.

@Sebastian

I would naturally prefer a more elaborate solution but let's not forget Squarespace is a blogging platform in its core (i am sure that's the reasoning behind the delay in addressing this), not a complete CMS. I was just brainstorming some workable solutions and while addressing the language issue radically is a MUST a more workaround approach would quite do in the meantime.

I was actually offering SQSP to consider $50 + 4 times $5 :-)

I opened a support ticket about the search function. It does not recognize non-english characters now (say, words containing å, ä, ö and similar characters). I received this reply:

Currently we don't support other languages besides English by default, however we do have some internationalization releases planned over the next few months. In the interim, you can add foreign language content directly to your pages and posts but the search will not function correctly because other languages are not supported.

I really have to lend my weight to this issue as well. Multilanguage support is critical to a lot of sites I'm running and the fact that I'd seen that Squarespace was working on this issue was what finally pulled me off the fence and made me decide to move my sites over anyway.

I love the SS software and the way it makes website maintenance so much more fun and easy to do. But it does seem to me that multi-language support is a pretty basic functionality of most modern CMSes. Not knowing the first thing about how SS is coded I can't speculate as to how easy or difficult it would be to add multilanguage support, but I do think it is an essential issue that needs to be given priority and resolved. On the surface, it doesn't seem like such a difficult thing to implement.

Is there anyone from the Squarespace team who is willing to speak to this issue?

Saket.

Josh: Thanks for the reply. There is a fourth issue that I hope you also have on the table: the possibility to change the fixed English text in, say, the comment section ("Leave a reply"- kind of texts). That stuff cannot be edited in V5, which is unsatisfactory. Is it really that hard to make all text customizable? When the issue was raised last summer, 2008, it sounded as if this would be fixed rather soon. But still no word. That is becoming more and more frustrating, to be honest.

Thanks for your response, Josh. It's always good to hear that the feature you're looking for is not completely off the books. :-) It would, of course, have been nice to hear that it was going to be part of V6, but I understand your position.

For the moment, I think I can survive with hard-linking to other-language translations of my pages. I have no idea how many of your clients are non-U.S. based but might it not help you grow more quickly if you can attract more international customers and thus tap into the global (rather than just English-speaking) market?

Anyway, I'd just like to take the opportunity to say that I think a lot of potential customers would be interested in this feature and, even if it is not going to happen in the near-future, I'd appreciate it if it could stay on the long-term queue.

Thanks again for taking the time to respond.

Saket.