english
deutschMultilingual blogging using WordPress
As said before, I wanted to blog bilingual in English and German for quite some time. Translating my posts into Swedish as well is a bit too much effort compared to the number of potential readers, I guess. Even though it’d be a good training of my language skills. Nevertheless I would like to have the possibility to do so and therefore the new blog system should not only support bilingual, but also multilingual posts. After searching around a bit, I found the Language Switcher WordPress Plugin which allows users to create multilingual posts, categories, blogroll links, comments (!) and even more by adding some simple tags.
The installation is quite easy as well, if you follow the given instructions. A bit more of a hassle was the internationalization of the WordPress Theme Dust 3.17 I use. Every language needs to have a separate file translating all the text shown. PHP functions inside the code of themes or plugins replace this text with the translated text in a language the reader can choose. In case you have to add these functions by yourself, the Language Switcher plugin page provides instructions for this task, which allowed me to internationalize the Quotes Collection plugin you can see to the right. In a few days I’m gonna send the changed to code to the plugin’s author Srini who I already contacted last week, so he can publish an internationalized version of his great plugin.
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Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 7:45 PM
Hey Tobias,
sorry wenn ich auf diesem Wege schreibe! Du scheinst einiges an Erfahrung mit Dust 3.17 zu haben, und es läuft bei dir auf WP2.6.
Ich benutze das Dust 3.17 mit kleinen Änderungen auf WP2.3 (werthsache.com/wp) und plane ein update auf 2.6. War die Installation dieses (ja nicht aktuellen Themes) auf WP2.6 bei dir so einfach möglich?
Beste Grüsse & Danke, Kai.
Tuesday, October 7th, 2008 at 9:26 PM
Yes and no.
Basically the theme worked flawless. I installed it for WordPress 2.5 first, which I upgraded to version 2.6 later. I did not encounter any problems with that.
But I do remember, I changed some parts of the theme. Aside from the internationalization mentioned in the article, I wrote some bugfixes to get the theme produce valid X/HTML code. Furthermore I changed the rotation script for the header images, so they can be cached which is worth a lot considering the file sizes. I might have modified even more I already forgot until now.
So, in brief: Yes, you can use the theme for WordPress 2.6 without any modifications, but you gotta expect some minor problems (though they are not related to WordPress 2.6).
If you are interested, I’d be glad to provide you with my version of the theme.