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Archive for the ‘Multilingual’ Category

WordCamp Toronto 2014: Multisite for Multilingual

By Rick:  October 3rd, 2014

WordCamp Toronto 2014 - SpeakerI’m really pleased to be a speaker at WordCamp Toronto 2014. If you use WordPress and have not been to a WordCamp, you should plan to attend one. WordCamps are great events at which to learn a lot about WordPress and meet people interested in and knowledgeable in WordPress.  We’ll be having one in Ottawa in the spring.

My talk this year will be about using WordPress multisite to create multilingual sites:

Multisite for Multilingual

This talk is about creating a multilingual WordPress site using WordPress multisite. The talk will cover: the basics of setting up multisite, some plugins to make it easier to create a multilingual site, pros & cons of using multisite for multilingual sites, and some tips and tricks to help with your sites.

Hope to see you there!

 

Posted in: Multilingual, Multisite, WordCamp, WordPress

WordCamp Montreal 2013: Tips and tricks for building multilingual sites

By Rick:  May 23rd, 2013

WordCamp Montreal 2013 - SpeakerWoot! Just found out I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Montreal on June 39/30.

My talk this year will be about Multilingual WordPress again, but more at a developer level (but beginner) this year:

Tips and tricks for building multilingual sites.

In this session I will share some practical tips and tricks I have learned while setting up multilingual sites.

We will look at things like:

  • Quick tricks for installing WordPress language files on exisitng sites.
  • How to deal with a plugin that has been internationalized, but is not localized for your language. (and do it so it’s upgrade proof)
  • What to do when an internationalized plugin has no text domain.
  • Some usefull backend plugins for managing sites and language files.
  • How to create splash pages for a language choice.

Prerequisites: Knowledge of PHP, and WordPress action hooks and filters.

Hope to see you there!

Posted in: Multilingual, WordCamp, WordPress

WordCamp Ottawa 2013: Getting WordPress to speak your language.

By Rick:  April 4th, 2013

WordCamp Ottawa 2013 - Speaker

In addition to organizing, I’m going to be speaking at WordCamp Ottawa, twice!

For the sessions on Saturday, I’ll be presenting a talk on multilingual sites in WordPress:

Getting WordPress to Speak Your Language

WordPress is available in 77 languages or variants, but how do you get it to show something other than English? This session will show you how to create sites in a language other than English, and sites with multiple languages.

We will set up a WordPress site that is not English and learn what to look for in themes and plugins to be able to use them with other languages. We will review the different strategies and options for creating multilingual sites, from simple sites with custom themes, to multilingual plugins and multi-site installs, and the issues related to each approach.

Level: All

Prerequisites:  To get the most from the talk, some experience with changing settings, installing plugins, FTP/uploading files to your WordPress install, and editing configuration files would be an asset, but it is not required.

I’m also going to be presenting the introduction to WordPress pre-camp session on Thursday before the main day of WordCamp:

Introduction to WordPress

This session is an introduction to WordPress intended to help those who are beginners/new to WordPress become acquainted with WordPress, it’s concepts and vocabulary before the main sessions.

We will: learn about what WordPress is, see who uses it, get acquainted with the WordPress dashboard, and learn about the different content types and how to add content, including images and video.  We will also see how to add and manage menus, sidebar widgets, themes and plugins.

Level: Beginner user

Prerequisites: None

Hope to see you there.

Posted in: Multilingual, WordCamp, WordPress

WordCamp Montreal 2012: Getting WordPress to speak your language.

By Rick:  June 23rd, 2012

WordCamp Montreal 2012 - SpeakerWoot! Just found out I’ll be speaking at WordCamp Montreal in August.

My talk:

Getting WordPress to speak your language.

An in-depth look at creating WordPress sites in a language other than English, and/or with multiple languages. We will: set up a WordPress site that is not English, see what is needed in themes and plugins to use them in other languages, and learn how to create translations for themes and plugins. We will then review the different strategies and options for creating multilingual sites, from simple sites with custom themes, to multilingual plugins and multisite installs, and the issues related to each approach.

This talk should be informative for WordPress users of any skill level. To get the most from the talk, experience with changing settings, installing plugins, FTP/uploading files to your WordPress install, and editing configuration files would be an asset, but is not required.

Hope to see you there!

Posted in: Multilingual, WordCamp, WordPress Taged with: Montreal

Montreal “Hello World” WordPress Meetup

By Rick:  April 10th, 2012

I recently attended the Montreal WordPress Meetup “Hello World!” Event to see what other people have been using for creating Multilingual WordPress sites, as my primary multilingual plugin, qTranslate seems to be nearing end of life.  It’s been problematic enough that I’ve been looking at switching to WMPL and have installed it on this site as a test.  This post is a quick summary of about 2 hours of discussion from that meeting.  A related post series I am publishing How to WordPress: Multilingual Overview has much more detail on the issue of multilingual WordPress sites.

The talk started with methods of creating a multilingual site on a single WordPress install.  Most of the plugins such as qTranslate, and WPML are used on a single install.  Single site installs may mean less maintenance (only one site to update) but they need

Some techniques that work well for small/simple sites were then demonstrated.  By using customized themes which have replicated parts such as the header to have a version for each language, and meta tags, or page templates, the site language can be controlled for a particular page.  There are some simple language switcher plugins/widgets that can be used with this method too.

Brief mention was given to qTranalate, but it was not a popular choice, due partially to it’s decline, but also to the lock-in that occurs when you use it.  QTranslate stores all the language versions of a post in a single post using some tags and then filtering to control what content to display.  This is great from an ease of content management perspective, but it means that a lot of manual editing is needed to change to another plugin, or even just to get all your post content separated into individual posts.  (Which is where I am stuck with a couple of my sites right now)  WPML has recently published a qTranslate clean-up and migration plugin that can help with some of the move.  If you need to disable qTranslate, well, basically you can’t, your site will be a mess.

The next major topic was WPML.  Many people at the meeting suggested that it works reasonably well but it seems to have it’s issues too.  It also has lock-in issues.  WPML and most the other single site multilingual plugins store each language in a separate post, and then add some control logic to manage which posts/pages are available to a viewer of the site  Migrating to another plugin would also need a lot of manual edit/reconstruction, although perhaps not as much as qTranslate.

This issue of lock-in lead to the final topic, using multiple installs and in particular, multisite installs.  Multisite removes most of the multiple install (1 site per language) issue of site maintenance.  This concept has some nice things going for it.  The most popular feature is that in it’s simplest form, you don’t need any plugins, so no lock-in.  If you do use some of the management plugins that are available to assist you with a multilingual mutlisite, your sites will still all run even if you disable the plugins as most of their features are only in the dashboard.  The only thing you may loose on the front-end is the language switcher.

I’m going to test out the multisite concept before going any further with WPML.

Posted in: Multilingual, WordPress Taged with: meetup, Montreal, multilingual
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