Nikola Nikolov
2013-06-28 12:28:30 UTC
About 7 months ago I started developing a plugin for multilingual content -
with the intention to replace the now slow and buggy qTranslate. I've been
working on it mostly in my free time and when I had nothing to do at work.
I'm glad to say that it's finally getting into a presentable shape and I
would love if someone wishes to help me with testing the plugin in various
configurations.
You can find the code on GitHub -
https://github.com/nikolov-tmw/multilingual-wp . You can download either
version 0.1(it's tagged), or download the latest code(which I would kind of
recommend in order to explore the latest features - well not that many
compared to the "stable" version 0.1, but still).
Please take a look at the Issues page
https://github.com/nikolov-tmw/multilingual-wp/issues in order to see
what's still not fully functional/doesn't exist.
Now a bit about how the plugin works - it generally registers a custom post
type for every language and every post type that the user selects on the
plugin's settings screen(by default only "Post" and "Page" are selected).
Then for every existing post "n" translation posts are created in the
corresponding custom post types, where "n" is the number of enabled
languages. The cloned posts are generally almost the same - they start with
the same title as the original posts, same publish date, same
tags/categories, etc.
Taxonomies are handled in similar fashion - except that initially the
translation terms get "||xx" appended to their Title(where "xx" is the
language code) - otherwise WordPress creates kind of "clone" terms which
change when the original one is changed.
I've tried using as much built-in functionality as possible and using
filter/action hooks in order to make the plugin work - thus hoping for
better compatibility with future versions of WordPress and less maintenance
on my end.
The plugin supports a lot of customization regarding permalinks - you can
change the "page" part of paginated URL's for each language, you can change
almost all of the english-defaulting parts of the URL to better match each
language.
You can have different slug for each taxonomy(like you can have "category"
different in each language), post type, etc.
There's also support for the Google XML Sitemaps plugin (
http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ ), which extends the
sitemap and generates entries for each language.
Generally I'm very happy with my work so far, but it's impossible for me to
test it in all possible variations - different themes/plugin/etc. That's
why I'm looking for help - if anyone is interested in giving me a hand with
that - I would highly appreciate it.
If you decide to do so, please file any bugs you find on the Issues page on
GitHub(as mentioned earlier in this message).
Just a note - the plugin will not become paid in any point in the future -
it will remain free for anyone to use. It's "copyleft"-ed and licensed
under the GPL v.3 license.
PS: so far there are two production sites(for which I know) that are using
my plugin - one of them is my small blog - themoonwatch.com .
Thank you for your time,
Nikola Nikolov
with the intention to replace the now slow and buggy qTranslate. I've been
working on it mostly in my free time and when I had nothing to do at work.
I'm glad to say that it's finally getting into a presentable shape and I
would love if someone wishes to help me with testing the plugin in various
configurations.
You can find the code on GitHub -
https://github.com/nikolov-tmw/multilingual-wp . You can download either
version 0.1(it's tagged), or download the latest code(which I would kind of
recommend in order to explore the latest features - well not that many
compared to the "stable" version 0.1, but still).
Please take a look at the Issues page
https://github.com/nikolov-tmw/multilingual-wp/issues in order to see
what's still not fully functional/doesn't exist.
Now a bit about how the plugin works - it generally registers a custom post
type for every language and every post type that the user selects on the
plugin's settings screen(by default only "Post" and "Page" are selected).
Then for every existing post "n" translation posts are created in the
corresponding custom post types, where "n" is the number of enabled
languages. The cloned posts are generally almost the same - they start with
the same title as the original posts, same publish date, same
tags/categories, etc.
Taxonomies are handled in similar fashion - except that initially the
translation terms get "||xx" appended to their Title(where "xx" is the
language code) - otherwise WordPress creates kind of "clone" terms which
change when the original one is changed.
I've tried using as much built-in functionality as possible and using
filter/action hooks in order to make the plugin work - thus hoping for
better compatibility with future versions of WordPress and less maintenance
on my end.
The plugin supports a lot of customization regarding permalinks - you can
change the "page" part of paginated URL's for each language, you can change
almost all of the english-defaulting parts of the URL to better match each
language.
You can have different slug for each taxonomy(like you can have "category"
different in each language), post type, etc.
There's also support for the Google XML Sitemaps plugin (
http://wordpress.org/plugins/google-sitemap-generator/ ), which extends the
sitemap and generates entries for each language.
Generally I'm very happy with my work so far, but it's impossible for me to
test it in all possible variations - different themes/plugin/etc. That's
why I'm looking for help - if anyone is interested in giving me a hand with
that - I would highly appreciate it.
If you decide to do so, please file any bugs you find on the Issues page on
GitHub(as mentioned earlier in this message).
Just a note - the plugin will not become paid in any point in the future -
it will remain free for anyone to use. It's "copyleft"-ed and licensed
under the GPL v.3 license.
PS: so far there are two production sites(for which I know) that are using
my plugin - one of them is my small blog - themoonwatch.com .
Thank you for your time,
Nikola Nikolov