Andreas Ebbert-Karroum

My Blog is based on Wordpress-MU and should be readable in English and German alike. For that purpose there exists a whole Bunch of Plugins, which differ in functionality, architecture and quality. For this blog I’d like to have these features, by priority:

1. Compatibility with Wordpress-MU 1.3.3 / Wordpress 2.3.3
2. Wordpress itself also has to support multiple languages
3. Posts and Pages have to be available in multiple languages
4. RSS feeds (complete, by tag, by category) should be available for each language
5. Localization of all titles and subtitles (Blog, Posts, Pages, Category, Widget)
6. Wordpress-MU itself shall be kept unchanged, no php hacking
7. The user should be presented with the page in it’s browsers default language, but should be able to change the appearance afterwards.

After taking a brief look at some Plugins (xLanguage, Gengo), I quickly found qTranslate, which by the way also has the most polished Website. That also tells a lot about how much attention the author pays to the details.

The installation following the instructions was easy and painless and most features are available. Technically qTranslates works by putting all localized texts between language tags like [lang_foo]Foo Titel[/lang_foo][lang_bar]Bar Titel[/lang_bar]. For the most important editors, like posts, pages and categories, there are new editors available:

With these tags you can also localize the contect anywhere else. When these tags show up somewhere on the page, it’s most likely not qTranslate’s fault, but then something is directly accessing the text instead of using some method call into which qTranslate can hook into.

• Blogtitle: Works, but language tags show up in some places, like the footer.
• Bloguntertitle: OK
• Post: OK
• Tags: NOK
• Widgettitle: OK
• Kategorie: OK
• Link-Category: NOK
• RSS-Feeds komplett: OK
• RSS-Feeds nach Kategories: OK, although the URL contains the category in the default language
• RSS-Feeds nach Tags: OK

With most of my requirements working, I can live with the minor shortcoming that tags and link categories cannot be localized. Additionally qTranslate does not work in the main blog in case you use directories instead of subdomains for subblogs, like I do.

What needs to be improved is the german default Theme, which you should install if you want to get your page displayed correctly in german. Unfortunatly there’s a problem finding the right version:

• The Theme for Wordpress 2.3.3 has to be extracted manually from the complete german Wordpress 2.3.3 archive. But with that version the localization is not complete.
• The current version for Wordpress 2.5 is more complete in the localization, but uses Wordpress functions that did not exist for Wordpress 2.3.3!

So you have to judge for yourself, if you can live with Version 2.3.3 or if you want to modify one theme or the other, or maybe install a completely different theme.

Overall I can summarize that I’m really happy with qTranslate!

Tags: multi-language, qtranslate, template, Wordpress

This entry was posted on Friday, April 11th, 2008 at %1:%Apr %p and is filed under Private, Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.