SMF Tutorial

How to Change Language Packs

With the international community that uses SMF, comes the need for SMF to support multiple languages other than just English. SMF offers wide variety of language packs available for download. They can be found here:

http://www.simplemachines.org/download/?languages.

Just locate the language that you want to include on your forum, and select the box, which in some cases includes a flag associated with the particular language. There you will notice two packages you can download for each language. One of them includes -utf8 at the end of the package name.

This denotes it is the UTF-8 version of the language pack. Bear in mind, that while this in many cases works best for many languages, it should only be used if your forum is using the UTF-8 character set.

Once you have selected and downloaded the language that you want to install, extract the content somewhere on your computer and then via an FTP program, upload the contents so that the actual language files (ex: index.languagename.php) are located in:

/Themes/default/languages

Note that you do not need to create another directory within the languages on. Actually, all that you really need to do is upload the

Themes directory included in the language package as the parent directory over the existing Themes directory, located in the root directory of your forum.

This will not overwrite any existing theme files or language files, but will in effect simply add the extra files that were not previously there, in this case being the new language files. Once you do so, your users will be able to choose from different languages on your forum.

The default one is English, the action above will add some new language to the list of choices.