I have been working with a multilingual Joomla! 1.5.23 e-commerce website for a client for quite a while and made several customizations. But the client is still not happy he has to adjust content at at least three locations:

• Joomfish
• Virtuemart
• Article Manager

Joomfish is nice in the way that it allows you to create multilingual content and copy and paste the source language on the same page, which makes translation work easier but it is annoying in the way you have to edit several custom fields at different locations/ content types. As Joomla! source language content still needs to be created in the article manager first this is the second location the client has to work at. The third location is Virtuemart. Here all the products and product categories are created. And here we added some custom fields as well.

Now I was considering upgrading the website to Joomla 1.7 or later on to 1.8. This J! versions have better multilingual support. But I wonder if er can really make the client's life easier. We will still have to copy the source language to a new article and create content in another language. We will still have the issue of content in custom fields that needs to be translated and we will still have to create content.

Should I go for another CMS such as Magento or do you think there is a way in a more recent Joomla! version to work with all content in one or max two locations?