Setting __Renderings field not shared in Sitecore consequences?

Question

Does anyone have experience in setting the __Renderings field in Sitecore to not be shared? We are building a multi site-multi language solution and would need the (sub)layouts to be different in different languages. For example, the English language site could have a sublayout that the Swedish version of the same item does not have and all presentation components does not always have the same data source for different languages.

A somewhat easy solution to this would be to simply uncheck "shared" on __Renderings field in the /sitecore/templates/System/Templates/Sections/Layout template, but does this have any other consequences? Or is there a better way to handle this requirement?

Answer 1

My own preference when needing to swap around visual elements based on something like language, country of origin, etc. is to use Sitecore's personalization rules editing to swap data sources and alter the presentation in that manner. It doesn't involve changing Sitecore's default behaviour and allows you to tap into built-in Sitecore functionality.

If your different 'sublayouts' are actually just the datasources being pulled in by various personalization rules, you can configure all of this with OMS/DMS and rely on the Sitecore engine to present the components you need given the current state. For performance, going with the most recent version of DMS is probably best (I believe 6.5 Update 5 is now the recommended release).