This article provides information on the various language-management features that are available for your Higher Logic Vanilla (Vanilla) community.
Set a default language
You can set the default language for your Vanilla community on the Language Settings page, located in the Dashboard.
📝 NOTE: See the full list of languages.
Check out the following article to learn how to enable languages and set one as the default for your Vanilla community.
Multi-language options
If your community uses more than one language, you should consider some of our multi-language options.
Multilingual addon
Our Multilingual addon allows users to translate the interface of the community by selecting their preferred language.
- You must manually enable the languages that you want to be available to your users; they will display in the footer for community users to choose.
📝 NOTE: The Multilingual addon only translates your community interface, not content generated by your users. This addon is perfect for bilingual communities where the main content is in one language, but users may want to see, for example, the menu items in their local language.
Check out the following article to learn how to enable different languages for your community users.
Silo content by language
If you would like to use different default languages within different sections of your Vanilla community:
Vanilla translations
Transifex has a full list of the languages into which Vanilla has been translated.
These translations simplify your localization efforts so that you can more easily target your community to your community users.
Missing / incorrect translations
Want to help us improve our translations? We have a Transifex project for contributing to this. Create an account there and submit your improvements for any missing or incorrect translations.
Updated translations go into our product with each release. For example, if you submit a translation to Transifex on January 1st, it will be in whatever release we "branch" next. Version branching typically happens every two weeks.
When your translation is tied to a particular version of Vanilla (such as 2020.001), that release will go through our internal QA process, and then be released to staging sites, to production sites, and finally to Enterprise. If you’d like to be notified of our releases, subscribe to this discussion.
Because there are multiple steps to this process, if you have a hard launch timeline that you need to have translations implemented by, it will be important to submit your translations in advance. If you have specific concerns, contact Vanilla Support.
Customizing language
If there is there a translation (or phrase in English) that you want to have replaced in order to better suit your company’s tone or branding, or if you want to customize the phrasing just on your site in particular, contact your CSM to discuss options.
Customizing multiple languages or creating new strings
- Our Support team can update existing strings of text for you, if you're using only one language.
- If you're using more than one language or want to create custom strings, this will require either GitHub access (Enterprise clients only) or chargeable custom work from our Professional Services team.
📝 NOTE: If you're an Enterprise customer with code deploy set up, you can create and override language strings directly in your theme files; see: