To make the most out of WordPress and WPML, these are the plugins we recommend that you use to create a fully-functional Multilingual CMS.

Page Ordering

If you run a website with lots of content then you may find the WordPress page admin screens a drag. Once you start having to flick through four or five pages to find the content you need, you’re going to start to wonder if there is a better way to manage your pages. Luckily, we worked with the developer of CMS Page Tree View to make sure that his plugin works with WPML.

CMS Page Tree View displays your content in a tree (instead of in the lengthy list that WordPress generates). This means you can get an easy overview of your website and quickly find the content you need. You can also drag and drop pages to re-order them. CMS Page Tree View includes a language selector, making it perfect to use with WPML.

Download CMS Page Tree View

WordPress SEO

If you’re serious about running a website, then more than likely you’re serious about search engine optimization. And if you’re not, you should be. To make SEO as easy as possible for WPML customers, we’ve been working with SEO expert Joost deValk to make sure that his popular WordPress SEO plugin works perfectly with WPML.

Did you know that with WordPress SEO and WPML you can create per-domain sitemaps? Sitemaps are generated for each version of your site. This means that you can visit your Google Webmaster tools to submit a language-specific sitemap for each  version of your website.

Download WordPress SEO

Image Management

If you’ve got an image heavy website then you know that basic image management in WordPress, while fine for sites without many images, can be a total pain. NextGEN Gallery is one of the most popular WordPress plugins around, which is why we wanted to make sure that it was effective for WPML users. We’ve spent a lot of time working with the NGG gallery developers to make that happen.

With the WPML string translation module enabled you can translate your entire gallery. The image and gallery text will appear according to the language of the page that they are on. Insert the same gallery into different pages with different languages and the text will appear in the correct language for that page. This means better image management for WPML users.

Download NextGEN Gallery

Better Search

If you’ve been working with WordPress for long, you know that the default search functionality sucks. Rather than showing the most relevant result first, it orders results by date. We use Relevanssi for all of our searches, and we wanted to bring their awesome search functionality to you.

Relevanssi is a big step up from the default WordPress search. Once installed and activated your site instantly becomes more usable. Search results are now returned by relevance rather than date, you can use query search terms such as AND and OR, and it carries out fuzzy matching of partial and incomplete words. It includes a piece of code which checks to see if WPML is enabled, and if it is it filters search results according to the current language. This powerful functionality makes WordPress a better CMS.

Download Relevanssi

Performance

As we run large websites ourselves, we know how important good caching and performance management is. To load your website, WordPress has to grab a whole pile of data from your database. It takes time to do this every time someone lands on your website. Caching reuses data from previous requests to load your website, this means that it doesn’t have to load every time someone lands, just the first time.

The two most popular caching plugins for WordPress are W3 Total Cache and WP Super Cache and both of these are fully compatible with WPML. If you have a large site with lots of content and visitors then you may want the fully-featured W3TC which includes Minify and CDN. WP Super Cache has fewer features but this makes it easier to manage and perfect for smaller sites.

Download W3 Total Cache | Download WP Super Cache

Custom Content

If you are using WordPress to power a complex website then the default content types – posts and pages – may not suffice. What you need are custom post types for different types of content, and custom taxonomies to categorize that content. You may even want to create custom fields to attach additional pieces of content to your post types. It has been possible to create these ever since the launch of WordPress 3.0. But what if you don’t know how to code? What if you want to do it in the UI?

We’ve created Types, a complete plugin for creating custom post types, custom taxonomies and custom fields. We know Types works with your Multilingual site because we built it. When you create a custom field, for example, you’ll have custom field translation options. Any text that you enter into Types will appear in WPML’s string translation screen. Also, WPML will translate any custom post type created with Types. This makes it perfect for creating custom content in a multilingual environment.

Download Types

Complex Layouts

We developed the Views plugin to work hand-in-hand with Types. Types creates custom content, and Views displays it. It’s a powerful plugin that queries the WordPress database. It lets you create complex layouts which would usually require advanced PHP coding. You can query the WordPress database to create powerful WordPress themes such as Magazine, Classifieds, Real Estate and Showcase Themes, Project pages, Sliders, pretty much anything your imagination can come up with. And you can do it all from the WordPress dashboard.

Views frees you from having to employ a developer to create the site that you want. And, since it’s developed by OnTheGoSystems, it works perfectly with WPML. Our entire development process for Views includes WPML so we know at every step of the way that it’s going to work. Everything that you produce with Views can be translated into the correct language for the front end. This means that you can build complex Multilingual WordPress websites.

Get Views

eCommerce

For many people, eCommerce is at the heart of their website. And it’s often important to be able to sell your product on the global market. Providing a multilingual ecommerce store can increase your market share and your revenue. That’s why we’ve partnered with WooThemes and WPMU DEV to make sure that their popular eCommerce plugins work with WPML.

We have created glue plugins that make WPML and these plugins stick together. You can grab the WPML-MarketPress plugin from your WPML account, and WooCommerce Multilingual from the WordPress repository. If you use MarketPress from WPMU DEV you can translate products, product categories, product tags, along with the UI, custom URL slugs, emails and messages. WooCommerce translation lets you translate store pages, products, and UI text.

Download WooCommerce | Get MarketPress

That’s it! 9 plugins to turn your WordPress Multilingual Website into a powerful Multilingual CMS. Follow the blog to keep up with plugins we’ll be supporting in the future. We’re always looking for ways we can improve the WordPress experience for everyone, in every language.

It was really fun building icanlocalize.com using WordPress. The visual editor and media management make it easy to get contents online quickly. But, like many newly weds, after the initial excitement, real problems begin surfacing.

Custom Types Turn WordPress into a CMS

A content management system lets you edit contents without having to worry about how these contents appear on the page.

For example, have a look at this website translation page:

Page with different elements

This page includes:

• Navigation
• Page title and body
• Testimonials

We wanted testimonials to automatically appear in the right pages. For instance, this page only includes testimonials of clients who use our website translation service. Other testimonials that talk about iPhone localization, don’t appear in this page. They would appear in the iPhone localization service page.

Until WordPress 3, you could build this using pages and custom fields. That’s great, but causes a big mess. It’s difficult to set up and even worse to maintain. And, it gets much worse when running multilingual.

Now, it’s all clear and simple. Let’s start with the setup.

Adding Custom Types from the Theme

Since the testimonials type is added to our site, the place to declare them is in the theme. All it takes is this code:

register_taxonomy(
  'service_type',
  array('post', 'page'),
  array(
    'hierarchical' => true,
    'label' => 'Service type',
    'query_var' => true,
    'rewrite' => true
  )
);

register_post_type( 'testimonial',
  array(
    'description' => __( 'Testimonials.' ),
    'labels' => array(
    'name' => __( 'Testimonials' ),
    'singular_name' => __( 'Testimonial' ),
    'add_new' => __( 'Add New' ),
    'add_new_item' => __( 'Add New Testimonial' ),
    'edit' => __( 'Edit' ),
    'edit_item' => __( 'Edit Testimonial' ),
    ...
  'taxonomies' => array('service_type'),
  ...

Once we’ve added this to the theme, we get a new Testimonial section in the WordPress admin.

Admin menu with testimonials

Displaying Custom Types in Standard Pages

So now, we were able to create testimonials as a new type. We’ve even added a service-type tag which says what the testimonials are about.

Next, we need to actually display the testimonials in pages.

We will collect all the testimonials that before to each service type and add them to that page.

What we do is:

$query = array('suppress_filters'=>0, 'post_type'=>'testimonial',
   'service_type'=>$terms[0]->slug, 'showposts'=>$number);

And, we’re done. Each page would automatically display all the testimonials for the service it talks about.

Multilingual, Out of the Box

WPML creates copies of the data in each language and associates them as translations. If you’re translating a testimonial, you’re actually creating another testimonial page in a different language. WPML assigns the language values and joins all translations together.

When our code requests the testimonial for a given service-type, it will automatically get them in the right language. This is because the service types are translated too and each translated page is automatically associated with the service type in the right language.

This may sound a bit complicated, but it all happens behind the scenes. In practice, you don’t need to do anything. Just translate everything and things ‘magically’ display in the right language.

Teaser – Using Views to Display Custom Data

In order to display testimonials on each page we had to write a piece of PHP code as a plugin. We love PHP and do it all day, but not everyone is like that.

Wouldn’t it be great if a plugin could display custom data in flexible ways? We’d like to be able to paginate, sort and do all sorts of basic operations.

We’ll supply the HTML / CSS and the plugin would get us the data to display.

Drupal folks are already giggling. It’s called Views – one of the most popular Drupal modules.

We’ve already started working on Views for WordPress. There’s no release yet, so this page doesn’t even exist, but it’s getting there. Once we’re done adding support to all the cool new features of WordPress 3 for WPML, we’re getting back to Views.

What I’d really like to know is what you’re using when you build full websites with WordPress.

We’re asking this for a reason. The next release of WPML (1.1), will put an emphasis on localizing texts created by other plugins and theme functions.

So, collecting a list of popular plugins which WPML users need will be very helpful.

The challenges of making other plugins multilingual

Plugins typically interact with WordPress in two ways. They access the database and produce HTML. WPML needs to make sure that both these operations are done correctly.

For example, a whole family of related posts plugins indexes posts and searches other posts for similar keywords (when done correctly, this operation can be quite fast). This means that to work correctly, in multilingual sites, they would need to either create individual, per language, indexes or use the language attribute as a parameter for the index.

Considering the fact that these plugins were written with no consideration for a multilingual environment, this can be quite a serious challenge.

And, on the other side, plugins also render text. A simple thing such as a sentence saying “you may also be interested in these posts” is less of a problem. Most likely it’s already wrapped in the gettext call and localized through the plugin’s .mo file.

However, dynamic texts are more of a problem. For example, look at the title tags produced by the famous All-in-One SEO plugin. There are titles per page and also for the home page, categories, search, etc.

WPML would also handle the per-post/page texts without any problem. The texts in the plugin admin screen are a bit more of a problem. They fall into the same category as widget titles and contents. These cannot be translated with a .mo file (since the texts are entered by the user) and also cannot be translated per page, as they’re entered once in the admin section.

How WPML can help other plugins become truly multilingual

In order for other plugins to become multilingual WPML is going to add localization functions which can be called from these plugins. The localization function should:

1. Register texts that need localization, so that the admin can provide translations.
2. Hook to the text render, so that the correct text is displayed per language.
3. Be an optional process. This means that the plugin will run file without WPML (but in a single language) and with WPML in multiple languages.

There are two approaches that can be taken here. One is to allow other plugins to tell WPML to hook to them and another is for WPML to create the translation functions for the plugins to call.

Not just plugins, theme functions too!

Premium themes (or your own custom themes) sometimes add a great deal of functionality to a website. This ranges from navigational aids, to a complete makeover (even WordPress’ mother wouldn’t recognize it).

Since we all can be very creative when it comes to writing theme functions, it’s important to establish some guidelines. Just like plugin localization, we need to get to a state where the same theme can run perfectly without WPML and run multilingual with it.

So, what are you doing?

Tell us what you’re using for your sites. It’s important to know now, so that WPML can support it.

Any major plugins that need multilingual support?

Any theme practices that have a hard time coexisting with WPML?

If it’s a simple thing, leave a comment here. For technical discussions (which we love), head to our forum and start a new thread.

Ford Motor Company Global Auto Shows website. WordPress goes big time! I find it interesting that a company with the resources of Ford uses WordPress for one of their sites.

fraai magazine website. I am finding quite a few online magazine style websites powered by WordPress. This site has a unique feature of giving the ability to “flip” through the pages of the magazine. Nice!

Ginger, The Restaurant site. I think this is a stylish, easy to find what you want front page. The South African website comes from an interestingly named design firm, The Yellow Llama, from the same country.

Quasar Software Engineering website. Professional looking site gives the feeling of being serious about their business. I find the mix between the local language (in this case Italian) and English interesting. So many English tech terms are universal these days. Website designer is BeeSoft.

Teepee Hire website. Who would even guess that you can rent teepees in England. The webstie makes you want to rent one and play cowboys and Indians! From The Development Studio who need to do a little work on their own website.

I found some of these great looking sites through the blog of web designer Adrian Diaconescu, so I want to finish with a site from his portfolio, the WordPress powered John Taylor’s Rugby Cast.

I hope I have shown an interesting cross section of  the creative uses designers are coming up with for WordPress powered sites. I tried to find and give credit for the design work for the different sites. If I missed something please let me know. And if you know of some interesting WordPress powered websites with good design and creativity please let me know by leaving a comment here.