Wordpress-blog with two languages - which plugin? - wordpress

I spent a couple of hours in the search of a solution to a two-languages-blog (site?). It seems that there are two general approaches: a single site which holds both languages; or two sites (thus WP installations) where each one holds a single language.
The solution for the latter one would be the Multisite Language Switcher.
But in principal, I'd prefer to work with a single site. Less hassle.
And I would like to use the same "New Post" page to enter the title and text for the languages - thus two title boxes, two text boxes. If I upload an image, I can insert it directly into each of the text boxes.
There, it seems the WPML is the way to go. Not sure about qTranslate. Tried it but only the title box was added.
Can you recommend anything else? Or am I thinking to narrowly? Thanks a lot for any hints or tips!

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/polylang/ - easy to use and manage languages.
For each post you choose the language you'll need. You won't get to add both languages in the same post since it would result in the same url.
For images, you don't need to upload it twice, just choose it again from the media library.

Not free, but WPML is probably the most advanced language plugin (hence the not free part). It will allow you to use a single install and choose the language based on directory or query string parameter. Overall fairly affordable.
http://wpml.org/

Tried out a couple of plugins. Finally spent many hour with multisite and domain mapping. When I got it working, I used the Multiple Language Switcher.... and like it a lot! Thanks for the hints!

Related

Can you add custom extensions to WPML?

I am using WPML to translate a religious website. I have the scripture stored in the database where each verse is a post. In WPML, translation is slow as one must open a verse, which is only one line long, translate it, save it and move on to the next.
I have tried automatic translation but they are not accurate enough and manual translation is too slow. I have also talked to WPML support but they don't have a solution.
Any suggestions welcome. Thank you :)
If the automatic translation is not good enough I think that you have three options:
Use professional translation service
Automatic translation but with different service, e.g. try DeepL of Google Translate if you were using Bing
Review text that was automatically translated

What is the difference between building a site on wordpress vs hand coding?

So I'm a beginner to coding and I am wondering what is the difference between building a site using wordpress (which I am not familiar with) as opposed to just hand coding from a text editor like sublime and then hosting it. Should I be using Wordpress? What exactly are the benefits? Thank you.
It all depends on what you want the website for.
I've both hand coded and used Wordpress (and before that Moveable Type) over the past 15 years. When I was doing infrequent updates to my website then hand coding was perfect. I could make it look exactly as I wanted, it had only the elements that I needed and nothing heavy in the backend to slow it all down.
When that all changed to being frequently updated Wordpress was much easier. The ability to schedule posts was one of the big things that got me into using it. If you're doing frequent updates, which, say need to post at the same time every day or multiple times in a week, but you're not necessarily available, then it's great. If you're short on time, then it's also useful because you choose once how you want the site to look then type your information and publish it. You don't need to amend any code or use FTP.
What you do lack is the personalisation. Unless you're also going to learn how to make Wordpress themes to properly personalise a Wordpress site, then you're stuck with the templates available for download. Some are great, some are mediocre and some are very simple.
My next project is to get my sports team online properly, and because there are about five or so people who would need to edit it Wordpress works for this. I can give people limited access to allow them to post/edit posts but know that because they're restricted, they're not going to break it all, unlike if I allowed them FTP access, which could be a massive disaster with people who aren't familiar with that.
You need to consider what you're really trying to achieve. If the website is really you and needs to reflect you and you don't update it relentlessly, then hand coding would be my first choice. If other (perhaps inexperienced) people are involved or you need to do things quickly, then I'd choose Wordpress.
If you want to create your first website, you should use a CMS like WordPress, because it will be easiest for you to publish content online and you will find many free plugins and themes at the wordpress website.
The main difference between a CMS like WordPress and a hand coded website is the first is not create for you. WordPress can be used in many way, but you will have to learn the WordPress codex to create your own themes and plugins.
With the hand coded, you will create a website optimized for what you need.
But you have to consider, you will have to code again each time you want to edit something, and for some features it will be a lot of work.
WordPress already include many "must have" features like seo friendly URLs, categories and tags etc..
But you can also look for another CMS, smaller than Wordpress

What is the preferred way to add custom data to a Wordpress theme?

I've read a number of articles and tutorials on adding custom content to a Wordpress theme. They almost always refer to small bits of data such as telephone numbers or emails that can be easily handled by using the option mechanism in Wordpress. This is fine and I've managed to implement the same functionality in a number of ways.
My question is;
If I wanted to add an option for the author to have some custom content on the home page - say a banner image, a paragraph of text (that uses the HTML editor) and a link to another page, what would be the most Wordpress friendly way of doing this?
I should probably mention that I'm not looking for a how-to or step by step, just opinions!
The best way to do this is using the settings api. A good tutorial for this is on wp.tutsplus, Its quite long. A shorter is from Otto.
It can be quite confusing at the beginning, but it's not that hard.

Selectively allow unsafe html tags in Plone

I'm searching for a way to put widgets from several services (PicasaWeb, Yahoo Pipes, Delicious bookmarks, etc.) on the community site I host on Plone (currently 3.2.1). I'm looking for a way to allow a group of users to use dangerous html tags.
There are some ways I see, but I don't know how to implement those. One would be changing safe_html for the pages editors own (1). Another would be to allow those tags on some subtree (2). And yet another finding an equivalent of "static text portlet" that would display in the middle panel (3). We could then use some of the composite products (I stumbled upon Collage and CMFContentPanels), to include the unsafe content on other sites.
My site has been ridden by advert bots, so I don't want to remove the filtering all together. I don't have an easy (no false positives) way of checking which users are bots, so deploying captcha now wouldn't help either.
The question is: How to implement any of those solutions?
(I already asked that on plone mailing list without an answer, so I thought I would give it another try here.)
Solution (3):
Use TAL portlet to add non-filtered HTML/JS snippets
Use ContentWellPortlets to show these portlets above or below your content.
I haven't used Plone 3.2 but there were some tools in the root directory of the Plone site when using the ZMI that allowed this. I can't remember if it was in "portal_transforms" or not, but I think so. It allows you to specify what tags in the HTML are allowed. I don't remember if it was something that you could control using the security settings (e.g. role based) or whether it was just a site wide setting.
Sorry for the vagueness but I just figured since you haven't gotten an answer that I'd tell you what I knew (little as that may be).
In Plone Site Setup there is a configlet for HTML Filtering. That may be useful.
PS: SO makes it so hard to help if your points is less than 125. May be I will just stick to the plone users mailing list.
PPS: That should make the answer "more complete"

Possible pitfalls on a multilingual Drupal site?

I'm about to embark on a journey to build a multilingual Drupal site, where I will most likely have to use Views, Panels and Taxonomy pretty heaily. I am a bit worried about the new-node-for-every-language approach, especially using Panels.
So far I've gotten it to work similarly to what I want by not having multilingual support for the Panels content-type, and fetching content that is from Current language and language neutral . This seem to work as expected, but I'm seeing some problems with it. There might be the occasion that I will have to have a language specific Panel (not published in English for example). If I need to have all my Panels multilingual, there seems to be alot of work to place the nodes for every column in every page in every language. I'm thinking I could possibly solve this by fetching the content with some kind of view with arguments, but this will most likely also lead to alot of work.
Is there some proper way of doing what I'm attempting to describe, or do I have alot of seemingly unnecessary work to expect?
I assume you have i18n module (http://drupal.org/project/i18n) and Views module installed. Then you can create a view for each language - one can choose language in "Filter" section of the view definition.
Once you have views, then you can link them to menus or blocks. The problem is you must have a separate version of block or menu for every language, with a proper view associated - Drupal is choosing proper language version itself according to the configuration (typically content type set in a browser). I haven't found any easier way of doing that.
Fortunately preparing multilingual content is not that hard thanks to the "transalte" functionality for nodes after enabling i18n module, so new node for every page is something one can live with.
BTW you are right that the way Drupal is doing i18n is not the best solution one can think of. I am having hard time with it sometimes.
Well there are some serious issues with views over translating taxonomy terms or vocabs names. This could be resolved with some extra modules or / and custom PHP code inside views fields. Usually 70% of modules does not support translation, then you need to patch them to support it. While others does have translation possibility, but it could be two possible ways: uses variables table to hold different translations UI dependent (need to switch to other language to find a string) or uses translation field tables to utilize "translation interface" from admin menu.
So far that's it :)
I wish you luck!

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