In a global market, we know how important having a fully-functional multilingual CMS, that’s why we’ve been working with a wide group of plugin developers to make sure that WPML works seamlessly with popular WordPress plugins and tools. We’ve even been producing our own plugins built from the ground up with WPML in mind; these plugins will help you extend WordPress beyond your wildest imagination.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
GREAT collection of plugins.
I noticed in the last one though, the link to download WooCommerce, doesn’t go to woothemes.com like it should. Typo maybe?
You can download WooCommerce from either woothemes.com or from the download page in the WP plugins repository.
Right, I’m just saying the link above, “Download WooCommerce” – doesn’t go to WooCommerce, it goes to MarketPress instead.
Oops. Fixed that. Thanks!
The glue plugin for WooCommerce is still v0.9 from 2012-2-6. Is this the latest version?
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/woocommerce-multilingual/
The release date is correct, but I’m not 100% sure about the version number. We might have forgotten to bump it.
Anyway, we’re going to release a minor update pretty soon. The current version is fine, but there are a few small glitches that we’d like to iron-out.
Hi,
we just bought a copy of WPML and we are trying to understand what is the best way to integrate it with WPML. We found on the web a suggestion to install 2 different bbpress plugins, but I think this approach may be outdated and I can’t get it to work. Could you just explain me very briefly the basic steps ?
Thanks in advance,
Carlo
We’re using bbpress too and we just launched a Spanish forum.
bbpress lets you create several forums. We’re not trying to translate forum posts, but just have a forum in each language. In that case, you can go to bbpress, create a forum for each language and insert each forum into a page in that language.
Make sure to include the bbpress .mo files for the different languages. This will translate the bbpress interface itself.
Here are our working examples:
* English – http://wpml.org/forums/forum/english-support/
* Spanish – http://wpml.org/es/forums/forum/soporte-en-espanol/
Inspired by this post I have made my Custom Post Widget plugin compatible with WPML.
With my plugin you can edit the contents of widget areas via the regular post editor. This gives you the benefit of being able to use the WYSIWYG editor and WordPress media manager. Also, standard WordPress text-widgets are not accessible for non-administrator users, but since my plugin uses a custom post type it is accessible for regular content editors.
Thanks to the WPML plugin you can now also easily translate the content blocks. You can download the free plugin here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/custom-post-widget/
Thank you for sharing this. Obviously, this is much more flexible than the standard Text Widgets and it also makes it easier to translate.
Hi!
¿What plugin recommends to manage widgets?
I’m using Dynamic Widgets v1.4.2 and doesn’t run fine
Excuse my English :))
Thanks.
I’m not really sure what Dynamic Widgets does, so I don’t have a good alternative for it.
First, we’ll be happy to work with the author of the Dynamic Widgets plugin. You can refer him here:
http://wpml.org/documentation/theme-compatibility/go-global-program/
To control where widgets display, you can also use a plugin called Widget Logic.
Hi Amir,
Dynamic Widgets lets you control on which pages widgets appear, do the same as Widget Logic but on a friendly interface.
Thanks for talk me about Widget Logic don’t seems very difficult to use.
Hi Amir,
Great list of plugins. Already using a couple of those plugins – Types and WP SEO.
Is there a Forum plugin that is compatible with WPML. I have tried installing Simple Press but I don’t think WPML can translate it. Please advise!
We’re using bbpress (the plugin version) in our own support forum. Very soon, we’re going to launch the support forums in other languages and I’ll be happy to explain how it’s working for us. I’ll write about it in the blog when there’s something working.
Hi Amir,
I am trying to integrate bbPress into a multilingual site and I am having lots of issues. I am wondering if you have posted to the blog any instructions on how to make the two plugins work together.
Thanks!
We’re using bbpress plugin here, on wpml.org and it’s working fine for us. We’re not translating forum threads, but we have a completely different forum for Spanish support. You can write about what you’re trying to achieve in our forum and the support folks will help you implement it.
Amir, thank you for your promo reply. I have added a topic on the support forum here: http://wpml.org/forums/topic/wpml-causing-a-sql-syntax-error-in-bbpress/
I thought I must have done something wrong installing either plugin and I thought maybe there was a writeup explaining how to overcome potential issues.
Thanks again 🙂
Hi
I am looking for a plugin, which allows visitors to subscribe to my posts, but only to the languages they prefer.
So at the end they would not end up by having the same post in their inbox in 2 or more languages.
Anyone?
I think that this will happen with WPML, with any subscribe-to plugin that you use. WPML creates different posts per language, so when visitors subscribe to a post, they only get updates in that language.
Ok that I know. I did not phrase my question correctly. I was not thinking about when a visitor subscribes to a post, like receiving a notification when someone comments.
I wanted to ask if it is possible to allow visitor to subscribe to new post (get an email when new post is published) but only in a specific language. So when i publish something they would not get 2 or more notifications. Only in their language.
I am just using the jetpack plugin at the moment and their inclusive subscribe feature, but I am looking for an alternative. If someone knows about a plugin that can handle the wpml? Or a solution in general?
thanks
Happy to read that you recommend a plugin I already use…
But still not-so-happy with the WPML — NextGen relation… I don’t understand… if I have to use String translation module… why the WPML media plugin?
And another Memory issue… Still your plugin creates PHP Memory conflict with NextGen when you create thumnails with it… I am using PHP Version 5.2.17 with 128MB…
Thanks for your time!
Jesus
You don’t need the Media Translation addon if you’re just using Nextgen Gallery. Try to disable this and see if it’s related to the problem.
If problems continue, please report about it on our forum. Brooks (the forum supporter) worked on NGG compatibility, so I’m sure that he can help debug and fix the problem.