Tutorials

Everyone loves faster sites. Speed is important to human visitors as well as search engines and it’s certainly worth spending time on, to optimize. Here are a few tips that can make your multilingual site faster. Speed and performance optimization are an endless tunnel. No matter where you are, there’s always room for improvement. There [...]

A few days ago, we added Hebrew translation for WPML.org. The challenge was less about adding the translations more with making WPML.org theme display it correctly in right-to-left. Daniel (our support manager) wrote this post to explain what he did to add RTL support to our theme. These were the main challenges we faced: Swap [...]

We want our visitors to link to us and share our links with others. However, WordPress often generates very long URLs which are difficult to share. I’ll show you how to produce short and unbreakable URLs. Have a look at this page: http://wpml.org/documentation/getting-started-guide/language-setup/ The URL takes 68 characters. This is the Chinese translation: http://wpml.org/zh-hans/documentation-4/%E5%85%A5%E9%97%A8%E6%8C%87%E5%8D%97/%E8%AF%AD%E8%A8%80%E8%AE%BE%E7%BD%AE/ That’s [...]

Right-to-Left languages pose a special challenge. Luckily, WordPress goes a long way to reduce the pain. We’ll show you how to create a perfectly functional RTL site, based on the default TwentyTen theme. When you create a multilingual RTL / LTR site, you need to address two issues: Editing / translation Display The first part, [...]

The Admin content-language switcher in WPML 2.3.0 allows creating different sidebars per language using Woo’s Sidebar Manager. See how it works. The Sidebar Manager in Woo Framework is a great example for using the new Admin content-language switcher in WPML 2.3.0. It lists pages, categories and templates and lets users create special sidebars that display [...]

WPML lets you translate widget titles and the body of text widgets. Sometimes, it’s not enough and you want to have completely different widgets for each language. I’ll show you how to do this using Widget Logic. Widget Logic is a plugin that allows controlling where widgets display using PHP code. You can use it [...]

Since WPML turned commercial, wpml.org is dealing with much more traffic. Two weeks ago, our server was running on 95% load and response time was over 10 seconds. With W3TC, our load is back to 5% and response time is around 300ms. If you’re not familiar with it, W3TC is a site-performance plugin. It includes [...]

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 [...]