Variations Make the World Go Round

The next few posts concern some recent finds when working with the variation mechanism in SharePoint. Variations allow for the quick creation of language sites and allow you to add workflow items for translators to translate the text and then submit the page for approval. An approver can then approve the page, where it will be available on the site. Variations work by creating a landing page in the top site which has some logic to determine the default language of the user's browser. If there is a variation with that culture set, then the user is redirected to that version of the site. If there is not a site with that culture, the user is sent to the default culture site. Each language is a subsite in the SharePoint hierarchy.

While the built-in landing page provides some very cool functionality, (to determine the users preferred browser language and direct them to the appropriate variation), what happens if you want to store the user's language preferences in a user profile or in a separate data store. Well you can modify the landing page and add your own logic to create the preferred action that you want.

This site demonstrates how to customize the landing page to pull data from a user profile to determine which variation the user should be sent to.