Multilingual

Update (March 13, 2010): we’re now waiting for WP E-Commerce guys to be ready with products as custom posts. When that’s ready, we’ll start adding WPML support for that.
Check the WP E-Commerce forums (or post there) to find out how it’s progressing.

A week ago we wrote about sponsoring support for niche development and now we’re [...]

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 other languages [...]

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 you might not [...]

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 change [...]

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 blogs can [...]

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 work [...]

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. This new [...]

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 enter [...]

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 change 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 we [...]

Bug fixes in version 1.0.1
Last week we came out with WPML 1.0.0, which includes the new translation interface. This release fixes problems in that part of the plugin.
Two problems were fixed:

There were missing tables for people updating from version 0.9.9 (fresh installs were OK).
All Asian languages and Norwegian were not set up correctly.

Everyone who is [...]

FeedBurner is an excellent tool for delivering your RSS feed and a newsletter. It’s reliable, easy to use, gives handy statistics and is free. I’ll show you how you can use FeedBurner to deliver multilingual feeds (and a multilingual newsletter).
1. Create different feeds for each language
You want visitors to receive news in their language only [...]

In order to run multilingual WordPress sites both contents and the theme need to be localized. In this post, I’ll describe what we did in order to fully localize our own theme for wpml.org.
The entire process for theme localization includes:

Identifying and marking texts that need to be translated.
Collecting all the texts for translation.
Translating the texts.
Using [...]

We’ve just started translating our own WPML.org. First languages are Spanish and German. It’s mostly working, but still has some childhood problems. I thought it would be interesting to share how this is going, tell about the problems we’re facing and how to they’re being fixed.
Some of the problems are just bugs that we’re fixing [...]

We’re almost ready for the release of WPML 0.99. This is yet another maintenance release, but due to popular demand, we’ve already pushed in some major functions folks have been requesting in WPML forum.
Besides fixing bugs (which we’re eagerly working on, as I’m writing these lines), the two most popular requests have been:

Build a really [...]