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 WPML Multilingual & Multicurrency for WooCommerce 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.