How to set up a bilingual site with WordPress

After lots of searching and testing many different plugins to set up a bilingual wordpress instalation, We have finally chosen qTranslate plugin. We are now going to take a look on how this plugin works and the benefits you can extract from it.

qTranslate is already on version 2.4.1, which is compatible up to WordPress 2.8.2 but if you are interested in version compatible to other wordpress plugins, you can find the list on the qTranslate Download Page

What can qTranslate do?

• It can translate posts and pages via the tinyMCE editor.  It creates tabs for each language so you can write your posts.
• It also tranlates the WordPress admin area to the available languages.
• It can work with permalinks. That’s how our site gets tranlated to english by adding /en to the address.
• The plugin also detects the visitor’s browser language to determine the visible language.
• Yes, it can translate Categories and Tags just via the admin Area, as you can see on the screenshots below.
• It can hide content not available at the visitor’s language. Useful, but we prefer to write somehing like “post under translation, please check back soon” when we haven’t got the time to fully translate it.
• It has template tags for translation!
• And the most important: it has an active community to develop, question and help other users through theForum.

What paths it still has to walk?

• It has to improve translation of text widgets. This should be easily done trough the admin interface rather than sidebar.php
• On our opinion, it should let users define wheter to use flags or some other images to link with languages. The using of flags can be troublesome to users, as Nielsen points it in this article. The use of standard language codescould be a solution.

Screenshots – Everyone longs for them…

This is how we acctually see the plugin working on our site:

Admin Menu to choose the admin language

Insert Post Title

Switch post content language

Translating Categories

Translating Tags

Configuration Page

Adding a Language

Managing Languages.

Now it is your turn

You have seen how to set up a multilingual wordpress blog with the help of the qTranslate Plugin. Go ahead and try it out. Engage in the community or leave us a comment bellow or at twitter.

Until next review!