North Jersey WordPress meetup group presentation on how to implement Multilingual with WordPress by Erkan Yildiz. Agenda: Presenter Intro Introduction Translation Plugins Translating your site Adding a language switcher Conclusion

1. Going Global
WordPress Multilingual
North Jersey WordPress Meetup
10/28/2014
Erkan Yildiz
Managing Director
RocketWP WordPress Agency
http://rocketwp.com

2. Agenda
● Presenter Intro
● Introduction
● Translation Plugins
● Translating your site
● Adding a language switcher
● Conclusion

3. Erkan Yildiz
● MS Computer Science, Montclair State
University
● 14 years experience as a Software Engineer
● Organizer at North Jersey WordPress
meetup
● Managing Director at RocketWP.com
● Consultant at Avanade
(Accenture/Microsoft)
● CMS Experience
o Certified Sitecore Developer
o SharePoint 2013
o WordPress
● Love web and startups.
o ContentCalendar.io

4. Introduction

5. Introduction
● WordPress does not support multilingual
out of the box
● Implementation is not easy
● Different ways: Multisite or Single site
with plugins
● Free or paid plugins. Still a lot of manual
work

6. What is “not Multilingual”
● Using a gTranslate plugin for automatic
Google or similar machine translations
● Open to errors
● Always use human translation
● Use explicit URLs for different languages
like: http://rocketwp.com/en/
● Translate and keep your content updated

7. Translation Plugins
● Premium:
● Free: qTranslate, Polylang etc.

8. Translation Plugins
qTranslate:
Pros Cons
Most popular one among the free WordPress
translation plugins
Performance issues and bulky DB
Has a long history and updated frequently Search in one language is practically
impossible
Separates multiple languages in a single post
by proprietary tags.
Deactivating plugin leaves a mess

9. Translation Plugins
Polylang:
● Polylang is relatively new in market, but is coming along quite nicely.
● It creates entirely different posts for each defined language, which makes
everything a bit cleaner.
● However, it has a bit of a steep learning curve, as it doesn’t come with an
installation wizard that lets you set up everything right from the start.

10. Translation Plugins
WPML:
Pros Cons
Easy to use and install Performance issues
Translates content, interface and plugins Sometimes buggy
$29 initial year $15/year for support (Personal)
$79 initial year $39/year for support (Business)

11. Translating Your Site
● Posts
● Metadata
● Attachments and Featured Images
● Widgets
● Menus
● Theme Options
● Adding a language switcher

12. Translating Posts
● Easiest and fairly straightforward
● Plugin creates different versions of posts and allow you to switch between
them while editing
● WPML and Polylang creates individual posts behind the scenes

13. Translating Metadata
● These are custom fields that the theme provides or the ones you manually
created
● Do not forget to translate these fields as well
● You may need to duplicate these fields for each language manually or if
you have a theme that supports multilingual this is done automatically

14. Translating Attachments
● Galleries, Sliders or the Featured Image on the post
● These images captions, alt texts need to be translated and each image
should be referenced in all additional versions of the post different
languages
● WPML’s Media Translations automates this task

15. Translating Widgets
● This is one of the most trickiest part of translation
● Most plugins (including WPML) do not support this out of the box
● You will need to a little digging and install additional plugins like “Widget
Logic”

16. Translating Menus
● Follows roughly same procedure with posts
● You need to create different menus for each language.
● WPML can auto sync menus across all languages - but can become erratic
for fairly complex menu structures

17. Translating Theme Options
● This is the trickiest part of translation
● Most themes nowadays include at least an options page where you can
configure all the site styling
● Make sure to pick a Multilingual compatible theme

18. Adding a Language Switcher
● Very important for user experience. Put it on top right corner or another
highly visible place
● Make sure to pick a plugin which supports switching to the language
chosen automatically no matter how deep the page lives in the content
hierarchy
● Most premium and Multilingual capable themes will have a language
switcher included

19. Conclusion
● WordPress is not built with multiple languages in mind. Sitecore is a good
example of a CMS which supports multiple languages with no customization
required at all
● The theme and plugin you choose is very important on how successful you will
be with the Multilingual implementation
● Keep SEO in mind Google likes: “One language per page”, “Cross Links
between translations”, “Human translations”, “A well formed URL structure”
and “Up to date translations (so content)”

20. Thank you
For any questions contact: ideas@rocketwp.com