Recently I decided to have my website in multiple languages, by having many friends and many people with whom I worked in Spain and Brazil. With this picture I could not leave my site only in English, as it was initially.
I investigated a little and tried some WordPress plugins for content internationalization and the one had better references was and is the Multilingual Press (mainly for SEO). I’ve been seeing the documentation and decided to use it. For this I had to install a WordPress Multisite. After taking a look at the official documentation I started on localhost (off course), exported the data and contents of the original site and left everything prepared for their importation.
After installing WordPress plugin and put it in its proper place, I tried to activate the Multilingual Press and the system showed a warning that said I did not have the sites well “linked”. I created my 3 sites. The original, one with domain ended in /es and the other with just the domain ended in /br, because the translations would be into Spanish and brazilian Portuguese. Once created, I activated it and went into the control panel and did Multilingual Press links, as we see below.
After this step, in fact I had three empty sites. I began the task of activating the template on the main site (in English). Also imported the exported data before and after a few more adjustments (upload logo, favicon, etc.). Violà! I had my site was exactly the same than original one. But would not all good news. The thumbnail images had strange sizes and is part of the portfolio showed uneven. I had to use a plugin to resize the thumbnails.
To my surprise, evidently due to my ignorance, to enter the dashboard of the site /es, this was also empty. I thought to have made all settings and imported the data on the main site I would have all the data on other sites ready to translate, but were not there. The template was not activated!
Yeah … I had to make all adjustments again to /es and /br, with their corresponding imports.
Another problem with what I came across was the widget to change the language. By default only had chance to put it in the sidebar. I wanted the widget at the top right and it was not possible (also depends on the characteristics of each template). According to the support forum of Multiligual Press, which certainly is very good and complete, I would have to use its API to create my own custom widget. After trying (without much conviction) without success, I decided to make my own widget, using tools that FrameShifit offers, framework which is based on my template (ThemeShift’s dePosito). In less than 30 minutes It was ready my language selector and placed where I wanted.
After this whole process, there was still the most delicate part … pass of localhost to the main domain. I had some problems with the paths in the beginning, but after repair them the site worked perfectly.
I don’t know if I’m using the Multilingual Press correctly, because my impression is that I have a site for each language without any connection between them. Yet this solution is going well and everything works stably, which is the goal. It is also true that the portfolio is based on a custom post type and perhaps the Multilingual Press only work right with posts and pages in WordPress by default, but not for me … so this post today is not created automatically in my other sites and for translate them I had to create them again.
