We have a wordpress site which we are planning to serve in different language on different domains. I did a lot of research on Google and went through numerous articles regarding this topic. However, I can not decide where to start, so this forum is my last resort. Can anyone please guide me.
Here are facts which I hope will be useful to anyone willing to help:
The site content will be same for all domains
Different domain will serve different languages
Users who comes to our main site, which is in English will be given a option to switch to their regional domain
What I need help with are as follows:
How to do this? Would multisite be a good answer to this?
If multisite is the solution, will it slow down our site? Given that we have same plugin and content for all domains
Plugins for auto translations of the contents based on domain?
I really need to get this started, so any help is heartily welcome.
You can add the Weglot Plugin.
I am part of the co founding team, we are available to answer any questions and help.
Key features include:
- Easy integration: less than 3 minutes, then users only take care of translations
- Improved usability: a unique dashboard gathering all translations in a single place, offering the possibility to edit and purchase translations
- Complete and rich range of translations sources: a first layer of machine translation automatically offered at subscription; professional translations; users and their team members
- Optimized SEO: following Google best practice, Weglot creates unique URL (/en/page) for each language, all tags and meta translated,
- Fully compatible: Yoast, Woocommerce and many others
- Light plugin: keeping the full performance of the website
- 7/7 support: dedicated team only focusing on developing the best multilingual plugin experience
Related
I'm building an estimate for a potential client. I'll do some more research if I get the project, but need some ideas for now. I'm trying to figure out a good solution that won't take several months to develop but will still provide good flexibility for future enhancements.
My options I believe are:
cms+e-commerce plugin (e.g. drupal+ubercart)
e-commerce platform that is extendable (e.g. magento)
framework+e-commerce platform (e.g. ci+magento)
cms+e-commerce (e.g. wordpress+magento)
The site will be similar to etsy where users can have items that they sell with their own portfolio page. The client wants to add many custom features as well. Also, the site will serve up a lot of images and audio.
I'm concerned that using strictly a e-commerce platform will give me a lot of obstacles to overcome rather than use just a cart+framework. I know Magento is written on Zend, but while I have used Magento, I'm not very familiar with Zend and it seems to take quite a while to learn.
I have never used ubercart,wp e-commerce, or virtuemart, so I'm not sure of the limitations. The products will not need to be configurable. But we will need to store financial information. I'm thinking braintree's vault or authorize.net cim.
I'd like to do the framework+ecommerce platform route. But the client would also like a lower price option, I'm leaning towards drupal+ubercart.
Just would like some opinions from personal experience.
Thanks!
If you use drupal and ubercart in future please read the book http://www.usingdrupal.com/ Using drupal by reading its chapter of ubercart you can easily create e-commerce website after reading this book ubercart chapter within a day . There is a book which is completely wriiten on ubercart https://www.packtpub.com/drupal-e-commerce-ubercart-2x/book. These both books will be very helpful to you for ubercart.
I've just created an e-commerce store with Wordpress and using the plugin Jigoshop for the ecommerce.
We use Wordpress as our CMS for all our clients and we've also branded it via plugins so there's no mention of Wordpress, it just acts like OUR cms.
Jigoshop is very easy to incorporate, it can be used very easily straight out of the box but as our site was very bespoke we tailored a lot of it just by using CSS. Very easy to use and comes complete with everything you need.
I tried various other ecommerce plugins for WP but they were quite difficult to tailor.
All really straightforward providing you have a basic grasp of HTML, CSS and PHP.
I worked with wordpress and some free open source commerce plug-ins. This was really a pain! I ended up programming my own low scale solution. Later I also worked with ubercart and drupal. The latter was one of my most motivating experiences with drupal. I found that drupal with ubercart can do everything what i and my customer wanted. I strongly recommend drupal...but i've never worked with magento...
I think wordpress is enough because wordpress is now a biggest platform in wordpress with millions of plugins oops sorry not millions, billions of plugins you just have to find a plugin which suits to you and your site content well for e commerce i recommend e-shop 5.0 its a great plugin.
I have been making plans to create a site that would contain several different sections, such as several blog feeds for reviews and articals, a forum, and also a stock site where people can sell/buy photos.
I was planning on doing this in PHP, but have recently started using wordpress and found it to be very powerful. is a site like this too "advanced" to be done in wordpress?
WordPress can be used for more than just blogs, having recently won an award for best CMS proves that!
The reviews and articles would just be posts, in different parent categories.
The forum could be implented with bbPress (http://bbpress.org) or SimplePress (http://simplepressforum.com)
The buying/selling photos could be done with a combination of either the built in WordPress gallery or a wordpress plugin such as NextGEN (http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/nextgen-gallery) and a shopping cart or paypal plugin.
It would take some integration work, but it certainly is all possible with WordPress :-)
This is not the question you should be asking IMO.
The question to ask is: "Does using wordpress make creating this website easier ?"
If the pages you will be creating are related to the blog posts, then yes. For example, with Wordpress, your posts categories can be listed as sub-menu items.
But, if your pages are not related to the "main" blog, why bother using Wordpress?
You mentioned you were gonna do it in PHP but now are thinking about WordPress. I just found that funny because WordPress IS written in PHP ;). Wordpress has been used as a CMS for a while now and I think it's often a great place to start. I love WordPress but it's not the only CMS out there you should look at Drupal, Joomla, Movable Type, or one of many other Open Source or even commercial CMS'. You may also want to look at other products in the Automattic family such as WordPress MU, BuddyPress and BBPress. I would say using someone else code can save you a lot or time but not always. In certain situations writing your own CMS may be faster and better.
Hope this helps.
But, if your pages are not related to
the "main" blog, why bother using
Wordpress?
It's a well known plataform, tested and used by millions of people;
A Huge plugin ecosystem that deals with SEO, Backup, Twitter, E-commerce, you name it;
A great documentation;
A great admin interface with WYSIWYG editors already implemented;
An interesting approach to use "static pages" along with your posts, so you can have a full blown CMS application.
These are just some advantages. I don't recommend Wordpress for huge enterprise portals, but if you're not doing a complete different way of interaction (like stackoverflow, which is unique in it's way of work) for a website, I think it's a better approach then trying to code everything from scratch.
To write plugins you just use php, html and some functions aviable at plataform's core. No useless XML configuration files, no proprietary template languages inside the plataform, nothing. Write a bunch of php inside a directory, put inside "plugins" and you're done.
Here are some sites that I've done with Wordpress that are more than just blogs:
Driia's Dreams, which is blog and online store for my wife's jewelry business. (I take no responsibility for her theme.)
Barking Mad Productions, which is primarily a CMS for an event production company, with a blog.
Ludus, which tracks the games that we play each week (blog), along with information about the games themselves (CMS).
Craig's Chaos Machine, which documents everything I'm learning about Chaos Toy and Chaos Machines. (Still a work in progress.)
I work at a more traditional ad agency and I am the sole web guy here. Recently a designer here redesigned our website based on the popular blog style seen about on the internets at the moment. Design is similar to this blog: http://effektiveblog.com/
I put forward that this would be a WordPress job, due to the designed features (tag cloud, dated/categorized posts, ability to be updated, rss, etc)
However, the non-web people at my workplace are saying they don't want to "do WordPress" and are planning on out-sourcing a custom CMS for this blog-look-a-like site!
As you can imagine, this is very frustrating and back-to-front.
However, as I haven't really delved fully into WordPress enough I don't fully know what arguments to put forward in regards to advantages/disadvantages in building it with WordPress vs a custom CMS.
Any thoughts on what to suggest to non-web superiors? or links even pointing to similar discussions?
I've been in the WordPress world for a few years and my observations have been that most of the "WordPress vs. other CMS" arguments boil down to a couple things:
Ultimately, you could use WordPress for nearly any CMS task, and you could use a general CMS to build blog content
WordPress was designed primarily as a blogging platform, so that's where it really shines. Yes, it can be used for other CMS tasks, but it does blogging best and that's where you'll find the most support and robust features.
More general CMS systems will offer features designed for a variety of content (not just blog posts or static pages), but they won't offer as many features (or as easy of an experience) for the blogging component as WordPress will.
Generally I tell folks that if the focus of the site is frequently updated content that is managed in a chronological fashion (like a blog), go with WordPress. If they're looking to integrate a bunch of disparate content and blogging isn't really important, they'll probably be better served by a more general CMS.
Wordpress is great for blogs and mid size simple websites. It's "static pages" approach is really useful, because you can create hirarchies that are fully editable from admin panel. It's plugin ecosystem is very good also - from SEO to automatic backups.
When I needed to convince some people that Wordpress would be a good idea to a CMS solution (not just a blog one), I created a prototype, and said that I just needed to edit a few php files (all copied from the default template), a few administration tasks and a few plugins and I was all set.
This prototype was really simple: no design, just structure. I made it in a saturday afternoon, and I made a challenge to everyone involved if they could create the same structure I created, with a full admin interface, in less time. No one could. And it's a tested plataform, yes, it's not "all MVC based", but it works and its administration is great to use.
I don't know if you have time to do it, but since is really fast to do it, I'd rather show them instead of just saying it.
One disadvantage of Wordpress is its performance. You may need to look at some cache plugins for your installation, like WpSuperCache. And be warned that if your website, in a long run, is going to have a lot of different requirements, Wordpress may not be the ideal solution.
WordPress is definitely the world's most popular CMS. The script is in its roots more of a blog than a typical CMS. For a while now it's been modernized and it got thousands of plugins, what made it more CMS-like.
Advantages -
Easy to operate-
WordPress does not require PHP nor HTML knowledge unlinke Drupal, Joomla or Typo3. A preinstalled plugin and template function allows them to be installed very easily. All you need to do is to choose a plugin or a template and click on it to install.
It's good choice for beginners.
Community-
To have a useful support, there must be a large community of users, who will be a part of e.g. a discussion board.
Plugins-
The script has over dozen thousand of plugins available on its website. They are the reason WordPress is considered a CMS, not only a blogging script. Strong majority of the plugins is available for free.
Templates-
On the scritp's homepage you can view thousands of graphics templates, that can change your website's look. You can find there both free and paid templates. The paid ones are often more advanced as well as more interesting.
Menu management-
WordPress menu management has extended functionalities, that can be modified to include categories, pages, etc.
E-commerce is available on WordPress
At Designed to Connect, we generally use Woocommerce – an e-commerce add on to WordPress to build our e-commerce websites. As an e-commerce store, you will often find yourself updating your products, pricing, sales, coupons and more. Woocommerce is extremely effective in doing all this along with offering great reports features.
Disadvantages -
WordPress updates their software frequently-
WordPress is constantly changing and growing and it needs regular updates. This is not a big deal unless you are looking for a set-it-and-forget-it solution, in which case this might not be the solution for you as it needs periodic updates.
Customization of a theme can be costly-
If the website was built upon a theme and you decide that you want to make major changes to it, it may be time-consuming to have a programmer make changes to the layout of the theme. If you anticipate needing to make major changes to the theme, consider having a theme built from scratch to meet your needs instead.
Advantages:
Low cost to upkeep / maintain website is cheap
Easy and good with usability on back-end
Tons of plugins (which can slow your site down significantly)
Write your own functions if you know PHP.
codex.wordpress.org, the documentation is so easy
Tons of updates for security
The community, the millions of users
SEO possibilities (when compared to other famous CMS)
Can make a big corporate to small website
Disadvantages:
Not the the most optimum use of its resources (but its getting better every update)
Security (also improving)
Advantages:
Simple
Huge number of themes and plugins
SEO
Easily convert site to Ecommerce
Disadvantages
Customization
Source: Advantages and disadvantages of wordpress
I've been adding quite a few blogs to sites and I'm wondering if it's better to add blogging software on the site or use an external blogging service. The major reason I can think of adding a blog to site is if you want to customize it later on (other than look) such as more integration with the site. If I put it on the site, I'll probably use WordPress as I'm familiar with it.
Is there any major advantage to one method or the other?
I would go with putting the blog on your website itself. This will help with a number of things:
Transparency: Your users will feel as if they are on the same website, because they in fact are. Your blog will become simply an extension to your website. On the other hand, a blogging service will most likely appear as though you are going to a completely different website.
Integration: You are able to integrate everything on your website with your blog. This includes any existing user bases, or future ones. Also, the look of your blog can match your website perfectly, much more so than with a blogging service.
Customization: You get 100% control over every single feature of your blog. If you want some new crazy feature, you can program it. Blogging services are typically much more closed than this.
The downsides will be that you have to maintain it, and any features that you want you have to put in yourself.
One of the advantages of having blog on your site is that all the content will belong to your site, which is good for search engine since it will increase your site visibility through SERP. But you will have the price to pay: installation and maintenance.
It's not cut and dried:
(Assuming this is for clients) do you have an ongoing relationship with the client and time scheduled for upgrades? Most blog software needs at least some upgrading or security patching from time to time.
Are you relying on some sort of social media network effects from these blogs? If so, you may get better mileage from a hosted product as they often promote related sites within their networks (e.g. Wordpress has the "Possibly related posts" feature).
As Brian said, integration could be an issue if you have other areas of your site that rely on logins. In that case, probably better to host it yourself.
Is there any SEO disadvantage in using a subdomain to host a blog on Wordpress or Blogger? I don't want to go to the trouble of creating a blog module for my site - I'd rather just set up a CNAME entry and point a subdomain to a free Wordpress or Blogger account. Will Google punish me for doing this by claiming that I have "duplicate content" - i.e. the intro text for each blog entry will be on my main site and the full details will be visible on Wordpress/Blogger? Is it better to incorporate the blog functionality into my main site? Are there any other potential disadvantages to this subdomain/external hosting approach using a free blog host?
There are a lot of advantages to self-hosting your blog.
You can do whatever you want with your own self-hosted blog. On Wordpress you could get banned and lose all of your content.
You can host ads or and do other commercial stuff not possible on Wordpress. (The free wordpress blog doesn't allow any advertisements other than their own ads).
Better ranking opportunity in search engines by using your own top-level domain.
You can modify your functionality at will.
It looks more professional and gives you bragging rights.
On Wordpress you may run up against bandwidth restrictions if your blog gets really popular - you won't be able to do anything about it.
Willem Obst answer makes some excellent points, but two serious accusations that are not correct. I know these are incorrect because I am part of the WordPress.com team.
Num 1. If there is a ToS issue, we work with our customers to resolve the issue. In the rare case, where a blog is suspended, the customer is still assisted with exporting their content.
Num 6.We have no bandwidth limits and never have.
Many companies use free WordPress.com for their blog. Here are some examples
http://wordpress.org/showcase/flavor/wordpresscom/
WordPress.com is also is a blogging community which gives you access to a large audience and the community features like the global tag pages.
It's a great way to get a blog going, and there is no lock in. Here is an example of a blog by some friends that started on WordPress.com and since moved to host it themselves to gain the additional flexibility Willem describes so well:
http://blog.bootuplabs.com/
Finally to the original question. It's a mixed bag.
The nay sayers to using a subdomain will focus on Google and other search engines generally treating the subdomain as it's own domain with it's own authority.
The pro subdomainers will focus on it being another opportunity for a result in Google and the search engines. As is the case for the "bootup labs" example. (Although, Google's Matt Cutts over a year ago promised this was changing.)
Unrelated to SEO, many teams use a subdomain or separate domain all together for web security reasons. You may notice that http://blog.flickr.net/ is on flickr.net instead of flickr.com primarily -- I understand -- for this reason.
No in one word
Actually a good idea. Self hosted blogs tend to have a lot integrated into them e.g autopinging
In answer to the question.... NO.
The question you asked is also a little ambiguous. Are you wanting to host your own blog ie run it on your own server under a subdomain, or are you wanting to add a CNAME entry that links to your blog.
There are benefits to both:
Running your own - Advantages:
You can control every aspect of it
You can change the design/layout as much as your coding ability can handle
If you have a fast server, your blog will be served to viewers extremely well
You can advertise on your own blog - Google Adwords/Adsense etc...
You can setup advanced analysis of traffic and see every little detail about everyone who visits your blog
You can tweak the SEO of your blog to the 'n'th degree
Running your own - Disdvantages:
Hosting a blog (especially a popular one) requires a pretty powerful web server
You have to maintain the blog and security of the blog eg. users and permissions
Dedicated Server hosting can be expensive
Hosting blogs use a lot of bandwidth
Using a third party blog - Advantages:
Generally free
No strain on your server/bandwidth
Security and permissions management is limited but managed by the host
Generally hosted blogs have an extremely user-friendly GUI
Using a third party blog - Disvantages:
Sometimes include advertising that benefits the host not your company/blog
Very limited ability to customise/edit the design of the blog
Limited control over the security and user management
Other hosts can choose to stop offering a blog hosting service
In regards to SEO and blogs:
Your blog is not going to suffer or be penalised by GOogle/Yahoo/Other search engines if you use a CNAME redirection to another host.
You will not get penalised by a search engine for duplicate content if the content is not completely duplicated on, for example if your main domain uses the title and summary of what is on your blog hosted on the subdomain.
If you adhere to the main SEO principles there is no reason why your blog would suffer on a subdomain:
Using relevant addressing methods eg. yourblog.yourdomain.com/title-of-blog-article.html
Use W3C compliant/correct XHTML/HTML/CSS code
Use appropriate and relevant META data (keywords, descriptions, titles) for the blog and the articles.
Relative linking instead of absolute linking
Hope this helped. If you have any other questions feel free to ask