Tutorials

WPML 1.7.9 includes a significant change in the String Localization engine. We’ve talked about it before, but I think that we never really gave a comprehensive guide about translating themes and plugins. Here goes. Translation Languages First, let’s talk a minute about which languages you’re translating between. If the default language of your site is [...]

Following the good experience we had with WordPress 3.o, it looks like it’s time to start thinking about upgrading. But, with great power comes great responsibility. WordPress 3.0 is a major change from previous versions. True, it uses the same tables, but a lot of the API has changed. This can cause existing plugins and [...]

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 [...]

Intro In this guest post, Wolf-Dieter Grabner, tells about building a multilingual corporate site using WordPress, Thesis theme and WPML. Wolf-Dieter gives both the why and the how, which are equally interesting. It shows how WordPress is used as a time saving tool for both the web developer and the client. The Client SBA Roll [...]

This tutorial shows how to translate your theme using WPML’s built-in translation interface. It works without any .mo files and you can edit translations from within WPML directly. The video (3 minutes)

In this is guest post, Michael Wassmer explains how to build a multilingual product catalog using WordPress. The idea for this post came from a discussion in the forum about sharing custom fields and media between translations. The goal -  a multilingual product catalog with WordPress To set up my small bilingual shop I didn’t [...]

How can we do a major update for a live WordPress site, while it’s already running? WPML is getting a major usability overhaul (by Joen Asmussen). This includes the WPML plugin and wpml.org. We’re going to do vast website changes, including theme edits, changes to page hierarchy and the addition of new pages. These changes [...]

Fancy links are great, but they generate huge URLs. These cause problems when you want to send links to others via email, instant message or Twitter. I’ll show a solution that doesn’t require any plugin, doesn’t go through an external service and doesn’t create any load on your site. WordPress has default link aliases to [...]

I’m going to show how to use Atahualpa, by Bytes For All, for building multilingual WordPress sites using WPML. A theme for a multilingual WordPress site needs to have all strings wrapped in gettext calls, but it’s not quite enough. Using gettext in the theme allows it to display in a different (single) language from [...]

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 [...]

This post is a real treat. Joen Asmussen is a usability testing expert. Normally, he writes reviews for companies such as LEGO. To help out with WPML, he donated a review for our plugin as well. This review goes through all of WPML’s options (current to version 0.98), tears them apart and gives constructive criticism [...]

When you set up a multilingual WordPress site using WPML you can choose to have different languages in different domains, in sub-domains or in language folders. This article will explain where each of these options should be used. This isn’t a technical question, but rather depends on what you’re trying to achieve. To answer this, [...]

WPML creates top navigation with drop down menus, a breadcrumbs trail and sidebar navigation. In this post, I’ll talk a bit about how to use and style them. We’ll use our own theme (used for WPML.org) as an example. Styling WPML navigation To apply your styling to the navigational elements, you need to override the [...]

I just had the pleasure of migrating this website from one WordPress install to the other. At first, I searched for advice on how to do this, leading me in weird directions (mostly revolving around mysql dumps). It turns out this procedure can be much simpler than anticipated, given you’re doing things in their correct [...]