Work with multilingual content

When having larger teams of content creators and editors working on the same content, it is important to create a collaborative experience and any team member understands who is working on which item and how to access other team members work, for example, to provide feedback.

With Sitefinity CMS, when working in the content editor, you can collaborate with team members by sharing a link to the content you are working with. To do this, just send your colleagues the URL and they can start collaborating straight away.

Smart lock prevents team members from locking a content item from other users just by opening it. The item is locked only after a team member actually starts editing the content. Thus, you avoid any downtime in teamwork.

NOTE: By default, only Administrators can unlock items in case other users lock items for too long.
To unlock an item you have locked previously, simply navigate to the item and then confirm the changes. 

You can also allow roles or users that are not administrators to unlock content items or pages. You can grant permissions on module level or on individual level. For example, you can allow Editors to be able to unlock all news items, but deny them to unlock only one particular news items.

For more information about managing permissions, see Permissions by section. and Permissions of individual items.
For more information about which items can have their unlock permissions configured, see Permission sets.

When working with multilingual content, it is of key importance that content development and publishing are not impeded by sequential translation due to locking of content items in different cultures. Concurrent editing of multilingual content enables editor teams to modify and work on translations of the same content simultaneously since content items are locked individually for each language. For example, if a content editor locks a News item in English, this News item can still be edited or translated by another author in, say, German. Thus, there is no latency in content production and each language editor can work on their translation without blocking other editors from creating translated versions in other languages.

In addition, language editors can modify any text field in the language they are working in. Such text fields include:

• Content body
• Title
• Other rich and plain text fields, such as the Summary or Tagline field
• Already existing translatable related data and related media content fields

  NOTE: Concurrent editing of related data and related media fields is supported only when working in the new content editing experience. For more information, see New content editing experience and the classic interface.

• Additional URL fields since they are localizable

All items of the same content type, for example, News, have the same structure in all their translations. This means that an item is under the same category and has the same tags, independently of the language translation. Therefore, fields that are valid for all translations of a content item cannot be concurrently edited in different cultures. Once an editor locks a content item in any culture, they can modify all content fields, whereas other editors can modify only fields, specific for their culture.

NOTE: You can translate content fields to other languages as well. For more information, see Manually translate content and media.