Advice on setting up a small multilingual site please

  • I am assisting an open-source volunteer group in recreating its website. The current site is hand-coded and, with its regular changes, requires strong HTML and CSS knowledge, and is too much work to maintain for the current volunteer. (All volunteers are, of course, unpaid, and do this work in their spare time.)

    The website has only a few pages, so it is not at all complex. But, it caters for many languages; up to 32 languages already.

    I think that WordPress is the best solution because of its ease and reliability. My only difficulty, being a relative newbie to WordPress and having never maintained a multilingual site, is choosing how to set this up.

    Looking at the WordPress choices, I am struggling to choose between what I believe are the three best options:

    I am willing to spend the time to initially set up WordPress correctly, so that it gives a long-term reliable solution, quick and easy to maintain. Should it be of help, I know HTML 4, CSS 2 and PHP 5 (unfortunately not HTML 5 or CSS 3).

    What I am looking for:

    I would value advice on which option will provide the most robust, easy-to-maintain and long-term answer, especially if you have experience with a multilingual WordPress site.

    It would be fantastic if the team could use its existing Poedit files (.po and .mo), if this is possible on WordPress (as it seems to be).

    I would also appreciate advice on which plug-ins to install, as I have no experience with any of the several available multi-lingual ones.

    Thank you.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)

  • WPML has about 40 languages by default and allows for custom language addition. It is the first one listed in the Codex link you added above.

    It works with .po and .mo files from themes and plugins and the full version has a Translation Management module that includes manual translation panels in the admin panel (much easier than translating with poedit though).

    Every post translation is created as a separate post instance with all of its specifics.

    Thread Starter Paddy Landau

    (@paddy-landau)

    @nofearinc: Thank you for your response.

    I went into the Administration back-end > Plugins > Add New, and searched for WPML. I get 105 results, some of which refer to WPML, but I don’t seem to find WPML itself!

    Oh… having just written that, I found what seems to be the WPML site.

    WPML looks fantastic. Unfortunately, I don’t see the team getting a sponsor to cough up the $80 to buy it plus $40 each year.

    I shall have to keep looking for an alternative option.

    There is a list of free solutions – https://www.wpmods.com/translation-wordpress-plugins/ . I can’t guarantee for any of them though, but you could revise them and see if anything looks like completing your project with.

    Thread Starter Paddy Landau

    (@paddy-landau)

    Thank you for the list. There are one or two that may be of use (the automatic translaters are not what we are after; we have volunteers from throughout the world).

    I shall check them out and keep searching if necessary.

Viewing 4 replies - 1 through 4 (of 4 total)
  • The topic ‘Advice on setting up a small multilingual site please’ is closed to new replies.