Category synchronisation
 

Imagine that you are running an international automotive site. Your topic is the brand Audi.
Your site is in the major world languages: English* Chinese* Russian* Arabic* Spanish* Portuguese* French and German.

As your site covers all Audi models* old and new* it has a large number of forums and subforums. One for each Audi model.

The site also runs Blog* CMS articles and Groups and each of these applications have one category for each model.

If a user would be interested in the Audi A8 2010* then there would be a forum* blog category* CMS article blog category and a group the user would be interested in. Therefore the user should be able to quickly switch between these categories* without going to any main index.

Lets say the user is a Spanish users interested in Spanish content. If the user would be in the English Audi A8 2010 blog category* then the user should be able to quickly switch to the Spanish Audi A8 2010 blog category* at the click of a button. And the same goes if the user wants to navigate from the English Audi A8 2010 forum to the Spanish Audi A8 2010 forum.


Now if your site would be running vbulletin suite then the above would simply not be possible* as no such functionality exists. The suite is made of isolated applications that do not synchronise nor fully integrate.

Running your site in multiple languages doesn't really work in vbulletin* as there is one default language per install. The default language affects various important things* like search engine inclusion for that language. Multiple installations with some kind of custom userbase integration would solve that issue. but asides that: whether with multiple installs or with doing all from one install* there is no function to switch from one language to another.


In the spirit of Harmony I suggest category synchronisation.

I'd like to suggest the option to link forums with blog categories* CMS categories and groups.
Once these categories are linked* then icons for related categories would appear. For example: In the Audi A8 2010 forum* there would be icons to jump to the Audi A8 2010 blog category* Audi A8 2010 CMS category* Audi A8 2010 group.

I'd also like to suggest the option to link each forum* blog category* CMS category* group and group category with the same category in different languages.
Once these language categories are linked* then flags for related categories would appear. So the Spanish user browsing the English Audi A8 2010 blog category* would see country flag icons that link to the Chinese* Russian* Arabic* Spanish* Portuguese* French and German Audi A8 2010 blog categories* and would be able to jump to them at the click of a button.


Please let me know if my suggestion raises questions.