Multilingual

Running a multilingual site is a challenge. It starts with the theme development, continues with building the site and ends with administering multilingual contents. The next major version of WPML aims to improve on all aspects. Just a year ago, people used WordPress mainly to build blogs. Most themes were blog-oriented. Then, came magazine themes [...]

Many folks who use WPML look at WordPress as a CMS, not just a blogging tool. Pär Thernström‘s CMS Tree Page View makes using WordPress as CMS a lot easier. CMS Tree Page View shows WordPress pages as a tree, instead of a (useless) list. You can expand and collapse branches and move pages around. [...]

Using custom post types and custom taxonomies, we were able to turn icanlocalize.com from a big mess into an elegant website, that’s easy to maintain and translate. 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 [...]

GetText allows translating texts in themes and plugins, but in order to work right, you must create texts that translate well. We’ll show you frequent mistakes and how to correct them. GetText is a GNU’s text localization package. It allows replacing text in one language with texts in another language. We’ve already talked about using [...]

We’ve started working on supporting the new CMS features in WordPress 3 and would love to get some early feedback from you guys. Menu system One of the best things about WordPress 3, came from WooThemes. It’s the new menu builder system. Instead of getting menus auto-generated according to page IDs you can now control [...]

Update (April 28, 2010): there’s a slight delay. We’re waiting for WP-E Commerce 3.8 to get started. Looks like it’s only going to happen after WordPress 3.0 is out. A week ago we wrote about sponsoring support for niche development and now we’re getting ready start with the first multilingual e-commerce solution for WordPress. Three [...]

WPML allows each use to have a different admin language for WordPress. I’ll show how to determine this and set the locale so that WordPress admin displays correctly in each language. Site languages versus admin language WPML allows WordPress sites to run in different languages. This means that one language becomes the default language and [...]

We’re translating quite a few WordPress sites, but too few web designers are claiming their affiliate commission, so it’s probably time to explain how it works and how you can benefit from our affiliate plan. ICanLocalize professional translation and affiliate plan You probably know about the professional translation available via WPML (WP admin->WPML->Pro translation). What [...]

Raise your hand if you like Googling for .mo files. WPML is going to make .mo files a thing of the past. All translations will be saved in WPML’s String Translation memory. It will automatically download translations for your themes and plugins and will let you edit them (if they’re missing, or you want to [...]

We’re just out with a first release of BuddyPress Multilingual. This plugin enables running multilingual BuddyPress sites with WPML. It adds a language switcher to BuddyPress bar, allowing visitors to select their languages. Then, it hooks to different elements that BuddyPress generates and makes sure they are all language sensitive. The main blog and guest [...]

WPML 1.3.0 will include functions that will allow controlling language properties without the admin interface. It’s useful for a lot of things, and in particular to migrate from other multilingual plugins. I’d like to announce that WPML will include this import functionality, but it’s not the case. Instead, we’re looking for savvy developers would would [...]

We’ve spent the last week creating a library of functions that enable to add optional multilingual support to WordPress themes and it’s time to put it to good use. Using this library, you’ll be able to make any WordPress theme multilingual if WPML is active, or run normally otherwise. And, there’s an additional extra benefit. [...]

WPML 1.1 is just around the corner with support for translation of texts created by other plugins. What this means is that when you’re using WPML and other plugins, WPML will let you enter translation for texts that the other plugins create. For example, if you’re using a contact form plugin, you’ll be able to [...]

To run a truly multilingual site your theme must be multilingual as well. Instead of repeating our textbook explanation of how to build a multilingual WordPress theme, we’re going to go over a live example. We’ll go over the theme used for nadelspiel.com, a German site about hand made needle sewing. Things that need to [...]

wpml.org is now translated to Spanish, German, Japanese and Chinese. Between ourselves, we speak English, Spanish and some German but not a word in Japanese or Chinese. How can we handle contacts in these languages? It’s pretty important. Some of these contacts are from potential clients. They see our website in their language and figure [...]