Multilingual websites

Another topic I wanted to cover today is international websites.

When we are talking about translating content into another languages in general we have to choose between two models:

• Content of the website is mirrored in each language or
• Each language have their specific website structure and contents

Both of models have their pros and cons and of course there can be some adoptions of both of them. This post is more about the second one.

I tried to find some good solution to create multilingual website and found nothing useful. Then I tried to find some plugin for wordpress, because the site, that needed translation is already on it. I found WPMU . But it somehow doesn’t felt right to use it. It does too much altering of database and I can only imagine how much action hooks it has. You see, I like simple things out of the box, I don’t like to hack things around, creating a big mess doing so. Although, it doesn’t goes along with my last post, sometimes you have to choose between two worst things.

Actually the last post comes very closely with this one. After implanting the new translations system, I started to think: “It would be nice to detect right languge before defining WPLANG, define it afterward and give back content in that language.” I already had heard about wordpress mu, but I somehow forgot it. Until I saw somewhere in wordpress 3.0 roadmap, that is has been merged with wordpress. That could do the trick. Wordpress codex have very well described how to enable multisite wordpress . Although it is a bit tricky, specially if your blog already have a content.

I choosed to have subdirectory blogs, and now we have 3 of them:

• / - for latvian
• /en - for english
• /ru - for russian

If I would want to store our default blog under /lv directory I would create another wordpress site and import posts under it from the default one, and of course create an redirect from / to /lv. Maybe we will go this way, don’t know it yet. For now blogs haven’t been translated yet. I could bet we will run in some problems later, but for now it looks like a good solution for multilingual blogs. Far better, than giving each language a new copy of wordpress.

To change interface language of the site, only modifications I had to do is in wp-config.php file:

  if (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/ru') !== FALSE)
    {
        define ('WPLANG', 'ru');
    }
    elseif (strpos($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], '/en') !== FALSE)
    {
        define ('WPLANG', 'en');
    }
    else
    {
        define ('WPLANG', 'lv');
    }

In general I don’t like wordpress (and I am saying it after all this:), but it has been great if you need to get things done fast and don’t worry much about performance, or worry a little bit of it.