November 20, 2012

SharePoint: Site titles obey MUI language

Issue

What I love about SharePoint is that even after working with it pretty much daily for over 6 years, you still keep learning new stuff almost every day. Today I run into a strange navigation issue when I had to copy and rename a site within Site Collection. Along the years (still remember my first SharePoint project like it was yesterday), I’ve learned to play safe, so I copied the site X instead of moving it, after which I renamed it to Y.

All good, except when I navigated to some other sites, Global (=top) Navigation still showed the old site title X. On some other sites, the title was the correct renamed Y. Also Content and Structure showed the old title.

Thoughts

What to do? Tried fiddling with the navigation settings of other sites and on that specific copied site in order to maybe refresh some cache holding navigation items. Usually it takes few seconds for the navigation to refresh in these kinds of renaming scenarios, but minutes passed and the old title was still there…but ONLY when being on certain sites. Something I hadn’t seen before.

Renamed the source site, and got exactly the same issue.

Well, went to flush object cache, just for the fun of it, no effect.

Opened Remote Desktop and recycled Application Pool, no effect.

Even did IISRESET, no effect. Conclusion: definitely wasn’t any cache related issue.

Noticed I had Multi Language User Interface (MUI) set for English for some of the sites, while having Finnish for few of them. Changed it to same language on all sites, BINGO!

Solution

When you define site title, you’re actually defining the title for the MUI language you’re currently using on the site. Change the MUI language and you can define different site title for that language, then when changing the MUI language, site title changes accordingly.

What was confusing was if some other site has MUI title set, it will show that MUI specific title in navigation when you go to some other site with that same language MUI selected.

 

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3 comments:

  1. The SharePoint MUI Administrator allows us to convert user-specified written text, such as the Headline and Information of the website, throught the web user interface. SharePoint MUI Administrator provides a very relaxed way to modify customer sources on the SharePoint website.

    ReplyDelete
  2. How can we do this with Page titles?

    ReplyDelete
  3. Hi Ahmed,
    I'm not aware of out-of-the-box way to translate Page titles. If the page content would also be in different language, would it make sense in making one page per language?

    ReplyDelete