Life @ High Road Communications

Growl. 

This is beginning to get frustrating. Apparently, finding a decent plug-in that gives you a fully multiligual site, with langauge switching, is much tougher than I thought!

If you read my last post, you’ll have seen that I was “impressed” by the WP_Multilingual (the guy who made this thing didn’t even spell it right – duh!) plug-in. Well, long story short, it sucks. I mean, it could be good, but it looks like the author has since given up on the project. With to many bugs to mention, the main killer for me was that as soon as I turned on custom permalinks and created a new post/page, the entire site crashed. I could only get things back up again by manually resetting the permalink field within the WordPress database.

Well, luckily enough for me, one of my fellow work-mates at iStudio, Kris Blazejewicz, found a good plug-in called Language Switcher (Poplar ProductivityWare) that looks promising.

Installation

Good start. It’s painless – just throw all the files for the plug-in into the appropriate plug-in folder and you’re on your way. Once activated, you just need to provide the plug-in with the languages you want to support. There are options for setting the type of date to render, as well as a default message for when there are no posts present – pretty cool!

Where the rubber meets the road

I activated my custom permalinks and there was no problem, the site worked just fine. Nice! Now what if I add in a new page and a new post? No problem with that either. Looks like Kris found me a winner – thanks! :)

Customization tips

I should start off by saying that the documentation for this plug-in is pretty extensive, so I’d recommend checking it out before you install, but here are a few other things that will help you on your way:

• Generate the current language of the page (two character ISO code) by using langswitch_current_lang().
• I tried to rewrite the permalink that it renders – for some reason the plug-in author has decided to place the language-related tags at the end of the URL instead of the beginning. Anyone out there have an update/fix for this?

Overall impression

I have mixed feelings about the results that I got from this plug-in. On one hand, having the ability to switch languages was just what I needed, however, on the other, the clunkiness of inputting each language’s content is pretty bad. In short, a fairly ugly implementation that could and should be improved upon (i.e. textbox for each language that content is being inserted for).

Another annoyance was the placement of the language parameters within the URL – why does it need to be at the end?

All being said, at the end of the day it does the job. I look forward to future updates.

One last thing to the author. Add this thing to the plug-in repository at WordPress!