After I’ve tested several options for multilingual blogs in WordPress (see this post), Dennis Ploetner called my attention to his not just yet very famous, but excellent plug-in in a comment.
The Multisite Language Switcher allows you to simply use a multisite WordPress configuration with one WordPress administration for every blog language and still have a relation between the language versions of your posts, categories and tags.
That’s really great, because this way you don’t have the problem with all these translation plug-ins that you always have to make sure that every additional plug-in you use (like a special SEO plug-in) also supports the used translation plug-in. Otherwise you cannot add let’s say a translation for your page title or description which is important for SEO reasons.
But not with this plug-in: as it depends only on the default and official functionality of a WordPress multisite configuration, you can use whatever plug-in that supports the WordPress multisite functionality.
You may say it is unfunctional that you need to login to another WordPress admin area to change a translation. But with the current version of this plug-in each translation is linked in the admin area directly (just click on the language flag). This way it is very easy to switch between different translations in the edit mode.
You can see this plug-in in action here, of course:
it can add a link below every post to its translations. Additionally the flags displayed on the blog pages link directly to the translations of the current page, too.
As a summary I can only recommend to try this plug-in if you are searching for a solution to build a multilingual blog in WordPress.
Do you know other good solutions for multilingual blogs in WordPress?
This post is also available in Deutsch.
wow… seems great to me!
Let me try to use this plugin for wordpress multi language site. thank you!
Quick question relating to the multisite approach to building a multilingual page…
Do multisites allow for plugins to be shared between the different language sites?
Here is a specific example to show you what I mean…
I use a yootheme widgetkit plugin that generates an image gallery when I add code such as… [widgetkit id=1548]
Could that code be shared between sites on a multisite? Or would the plugin (and thus the galleries) need to be managed seperately for each site on a multisite?
This naturally has some impact on the suitability of the multisite approach to multilingual websites, so any thoughts on this would be much appreciated!
-Ben
Hello Ben,
that completely depends on the plug-in you’re using:
some plugins support WordPress multisite functionality (and this way share data between sites), some others don’t. So I can’t say that for the plug-in you’re using. You just need to test it or ask the plug-in developer.
Best regards
Andreas
sweet, I’ll check that out, thanks a lot!
Thanks for this post, very useful.
I’m trying to set a multisite + multisite language switcher, but I was wondering how you did this on your site with the default language/path.
In my network I now have the base site ‘/’ and another language site ‘/en’. Your URL is always with a language identifier.
Hello Paul,
in fact I do have 3 sites on this WordPress multisite installation:
one site for “/en/”, one for “/de/” and one default site for “/”.
But for the last one I just use a redirection in my theme based on the browser language to the correct language site.
Best regards
Andreas
Thanks Andreas.
I’m a little bit struggling how to set up a multilingual website. Should I set it up with a language identifier in the URL for each language ‘example.com/de’, ‘example.com/nl
or
Use a default language without identifier in the URL and for the additional languages a identifier in the URL.
In a .com tld it does make sense to use always a language identifier, but for e.g. a .nl tld does it not make sense to use one when the language is nl. ‘example.nl/nl’
What’s your opinion about this?
transposh wordpress plugin has this feature, but i don;t know this actually works on MU or Not.
Hello Paul,
as you can see on my site here, I prefer to not have a default language as this would imply in my opinion that one language is more important than another.
But you’re right that if you only have a language specific domain like “.nl”, it could make sense. On the other hand I personally would never operate a multilingual blog on a language specific domain only. I also have the “.de” domain for this site here, but it just redirects to the “.com” one.
Best regards
Andreas
Hi Andreas
Which code do you use for the redirection? I just can get it right with wp_redirect.
Regards
Paul
ps: Congrats for the German team from yesterday
I meant: I can not get it done.
Hello Paul,
just created an own theme for the redirect with some custom PHP code. I try to find some time to make a blog post about that at the beginning of next week.
When you’re subscribe to this blog, you should get a notification when it’s released.
Best regards
Andreas
Hello Paul,
sorry for the delay, but now I finally released a post about this redirect theme.
Best regards
Andreas
Thanks a lot Andreas.
This is just what I needed!
Best regards,
Paul
I thinks Transposh is best solution but these kind of plugins have duplicate content issues.
Hello Navin,
I don’t know this plug-in, but it looks like as this would be more for automatic translation which is completely useless in my opinion and therefore I would never suggest to use an automated translation plug-in.
Best regards
Andreas
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