I would like to make my site a alike to both Swedish (as it is now) and English speaking people.
I’ve read up about using either WPMU or creating a multi site. The multi site seems to be widely adviced against and as far as I can read here many users reports issues or incompability with the WPMU-plugin.
How would I beat go starting to creating a multilingual site based on newspaper?
Hi,
I use qTranslate X. Never tried WPMU but I read about it when I faced the same question as you. You said “either WPMU or creating a multi site” but if I recall correctly, WPMU works as a multi site management system. WPMU physically creates X entries per content (1 per language) while plugins like qtrans create only one with all languages inside [sorry this is wildly phrased]. Multi site is supposedly good for performance because having the content separated makes it easier to serve it, while qtransx has to slice the content and extract the desired language upon request. Cache can fix this. Multi site is supposedly worse regarding compatibility and content consistency. It depends on the kind of use your site gets, and whether your content will greatly vary across languages or will be just straight forward translation.
I started with qTranslate and then moved on to mqTranslate, which was deprecated in favor of qTranslate X some time after. It’s not perfect but it’s the only alternative to the multi site option of WPMU, I believe, and it works very well, for a free plugin at least. The plugin is actively being supported and developed which is nice. The only thing missing is native multi slug support (same post has different URLs, one per language) but there’s a plugin for that and they say they will incorporate it in the future.
qTransX can give you a bit of work if you use some “non-mainstream” plugins as these sometimes do not take multi language support into consideration. Many mainstream plugins work flawlessly and others have plugins to extend qtransx compatibility. For instance, I use these ones:
WPBakery Visual Composer & qTranslate-X
WordPress SEO & qTranslate-X
WooCommerce & qTranslate-X
qTranslate slug (for the language based URLs)
Some configurations can have a performance impact in cheap servers, but with a well configured cache it’s actually pretty solid. I run a shitty shared server (for the time being) with ease but I do not use features like browser-language detection and redirection, I use the simple “language in the url” option (example.com/en/ example.com/pt/ etc).
In the end I think it comes down to the degree of support needed. “Hands on” kind of persons might be better off with qTransX, otherwise it might be good to check out WPMU forums and documentation to see if they offer the support it usually comes with premium stuff.
Cheers!
Thank you for a great answer! I guess I have to set up a test-install and try both the multi-sites and qTranslate X-alternatives.
The issue i feel about using a wordpress multi site solution is mainly that I want the site to recognize the visitors language based on IP and the display the correct language (of course with an option to change it in the main menu). As far as I can see qTranslate does this.
The missing of language-based slugs/adresses is however a problem since I´m guessing SEO-rankning does takes an impact if the adress is in another language part from titles and such.
Apart from the posts and translation of them (which I assume works really well) how dows qTranslate X handles comments, menus and other “small” stuff?
I find the plugin very stable now, I would say it’s 5 times better than what I had available originally 8/9 months ago, when I started this as a hobbie at first. Again, I recommend a decent server, the cheapest one will require work to stay fast and deliver a pleasant user experience (like CDN, cache, optimized images, etc)
Dates are now easily set, used to be an headache. Depends what one consider “small things” I guess 🙂 everything that is standard or mainstream works very well.
Comments are not affected by the plugin (except for the labels of the input fields ofc), a comment made in a post, regardless of its content or its language, will appear in all versions (languages) of the post/page. I remember I stumbled upon an extension/plugin which allowed to show comments separated per language, I see it can be useful in some cases but it is not for mine, a least for now, so I never used/tested it. Out of the box, no option is given to the user commentating in regard of classifying a post as being in any particular language.
Menus are great, I just need to customize the theme or the plugin to show a flag in mobile, between the icons of search and slide the menu. Right now is ok but (just one click away) but I kindda like gimmicks
You can have a look at http://www.infoporto.pt but I still have some bugs and it might not be the best example because it has some customizations and custom post types and custom post fields… I just started January and I have other things not related to the site it self to deal with… The hobbie became serious but I had to focus first on one language first because, in my case, there’s a will to have some depth in the differences of the contents of each language (2 so far, soon professionals will be hired to translate a more solid number). I also had delays in releasing “final” and complete version of my site cause of constant developments, newspaper seems to support child themes and custom post types now so I need to check out that first before continuing to fine tune the custom functions I already made.
