January 7, 2009 ICanLocalize is working on a translation system that will enable building multilingual websites using WPMU.
The idea is to use WPMU to serve different language versions of the same contents instead of different independent sites.
Why WPMU?
WordPress is designed to serve contents in a single language. WP core and database structure doesn’t include multilingual support in the same blog. It’s possible to hack this, use custom fields to add language information and add language names to permlinks, but this means bending the rules and breaking things in various places.
A much cleaner approach is to keep running each blog in a single language and use WPMU to serve individual blogs as one unit. This way, users can configure WPMU to serve different languages as sub-domains or directories of the same domain.
How will this look like?
The solution ICanLocalize is working on includes:
- Synchronizing between contents in different languages.
- Adjusting internal and external links to go to the same content in the correct language.
- Adding language selectors.
- Comment moderation and reply in the author’s language.
The idea is that the authors can enter contents in their native language and translations follow automatically. Each post or page would show contents and comments in a single language (language selectors would lead to the corresponding contents in other languages). Readers would leave comments in their languages and authors will be able to moderate and respond in their native language.
Who needs it?
This sort of translation system would make it possible to run a multilingual blogs, but the more interesting application is using WPMU for building full multilingual websites using WordPress. Such sites often include a mix of pages for “static” contents and posts for “news”.
It turns out that many people are switching from established content management systems, such as Joomla!, to WordPress. It’s just much easier to build it with WordPress and the results are great. When used to build business sites, multilingual support is basic feature in any modern CMS and this approach might fill the demand.
Project status
The basic parts of this translation system are already up and running. You can see a live example at the popular WebLogToolsCollection who’s Spanish version is being maintained with it.
There’s still a lot of work to be done making everything a bit more user friendly and better documented (or even better, just require less documentation).
To try it yourself, check out this getting started guide.
What do you think?
Leave a comment and tell us where you’d like to see this going.
We used WPMU as a solution for a multi-language site ourselves (http://www.grande.be/).
It’s cool you guys get it now in a product :-)
For the WP core we are working and experimenting with a complete language plugin which has the following specifications:
*unlimitted translations
*translation of posts, pages, categories, tags,…
*multi-language permalink structure
*…
The release of the plugin will be in the beginning of Februari.
On our site http://motionmill.com/ you’ll find a demo.
my site is currently using a wordpress and a plugin to make it multilingual. this wpmu idea is good, but I think there will be some problems on how to synchronize the time of the post and the themes compatibility.
In my opinion, WPMU should be the main WordPress development path to encourage developers making themes/plugins compatible for WPMU. The single user version then will be the ‘lite version’ of the wordpress.
just my 2 cent :)
Hi hamdan,
We use the WP XML-RPC calls to create and update posts on the different language blogs. These allow setting the publish date along with any other information.
Theme compatibility was never a problem in the blogs that have been translated with our system. Right now, we’re handling more than 500 blogs and didn’t ever need to worry about that. The fact that WP isn’t modified in any way to add multilingual support makes it indifferent to the theme.
The only thing that needs to be added to themes in order to make it truly multilingual are the language selectors. The translation plugin comes with that PHP function and it just needs to be inserted into header.php.
I completely agree with you that WPMU should have been the standard development branch and WP could have been a simple derivative.
I love word press :) very good template
Thanks ypou for tht man!
This one makes me want to switch to wordpress. Blogger simply isn’t as “customizable”.
@Len, actually, you’d need to run your own blog (the wordpress.org) platform. I don’t think that any of this can run on the hosted version in wordpress.com.
Let me know if you find any way for doing this. I’d love to know about it.