The Multilingual Acknowledgement
I suppose, since others have already beat me to blogging it (Chris, Firas), it’s probably time to mention my new plugin project here.
Multilingual is a WordPress plugin I’ve been developing with Chris Waigl (who blogs bilingually herself), and which has recently been generating some amount of interest among the international bloggers in #wordpress. Its goal is to provide a powerful means to blog in any number of languages, and we hope to make it the most intuitive, powerful and elegant multilingual blogging tool available — all in a simple plugin form.
It was inspired by a post on Stephanie Booth’s blog listing, among other things, some functionality she’d like to have in a bilingual plugin. Chris & I took Stephanie’s ideas even further, and have already built functionality for:
- Writing unlimited alternate-language versions of any post, in any language — including title, excerpt and post content — while maintaining support for
<!--more-->links and pagination - Post-level language switching for readers, using cookies to save the state of multiple posts
- Page-level language switching for readers
- Automatic discovery of readers’ preferred languages
- A WordPress localization module switcher
- Customizable locales when outputting date and time information (on a per-post basis, with translation)
- Semantically correct (X)HTML
langandxml:langattributes
In addition, we plan to build support for the following:
- Permalink integration, with alternate-language versions of post slugs and sanitized category names
<link>s to alternate-language versions, as well as other semantically correct elements (with thanks to Firas)- Alternate-language category names
- Alternate-language template text
- Machine translation tie-ins
Some folks, like Firas, have already contributed some great ideas to the project. We absolutely welcome these, and encourage you to let us know if you think of anything you’d like to see incorporated into the project.
As the project matures, we will be taking pains to cover as many bases as possible in terms of locales and language support. But obviously, together Chris & I only speak three languages — so we’ll be relying heavily on support from the international WordPress community for testing in languages that we don’t speak (Chinese in particular will need some heavy testing) and contributions of locale and localization information. (Thanks go out already to Andreas Pedersen, Dr. Dave, and neuro` for their help with the Danish, Japanese, and French locales, respectively.) At some point we will set up a permanent resource where folks can contribute this information, but until then please contact us directly by email or comment if you’d like to help out. (I’m morgan at this domain.)
Currently the project is still pre-alpha, so it is not ready to be used. Like all other plugins at wp-plugins.org, it can be downloaded at any time, but it is currently not recommended for anything other than non-production testing. Its development is progressing rapidly, so if you want to test it at this point, please be sure you know what you’re doing and can troubleshoot if an update is not backward-compatible. Naturally, I advise anyone interested in testing to take all necessary precautions to avoid or recover from a system meltdown should the plugin go awry. And if it does, please tell us about it.
The plugin will have its own page on my site, where the changelog and documentation will be placed at some point in the future. I’ll be posting further updates here as the development progresses, so stay tuned!
February 3rd, 2005 at 2:21 am
Can’t wait. This is exactly what I’ve been looking for. I might set up a test blog just to experiment with it.
March 24th, 2005 at 2:37 am
I am testing this on my testing blog. The plugin looks great. Just one question, and I know this seems idiotic. But what command do I use to call the plugin. Something like . I have scoured the plugin file and I can’t seem to find it. Thanks and wonderful job.
March 24th, 2005 at 7:13 am
Kathleen,
Currently, there are a few template functions that need to be added in order for your template to show the different languages. However, there were some very helpful, very significant changes made to the plugin API before the final 1.5 release, which will make most of the template functions unnecessary that are there curently. So I anticipate that most of the template functions will be eliminated entirely in the next update of Multilingual, and be replaced by hooks into the default WP functions—meaning you will have to add far fewer template functions to your code, if any.
At this point I’d recommend either waiting for the next release to start testing, or diving into the code to see what functions you want to use. If I were to do some documentation now, it would be a very large undertaking that would become almost entirely obsolete very soon.
If you want to dive into the code, all of the template functions are grouped together in the source, and have the same name as their equivalent WP functions, with
_multilingualtacked on the end. Sothe_content()becomesthe_content_multilingual(), etc.I’m afraid that’s the best I can do right now, to avoid lots of throw-away work.
Thanks so much for your interest, and as I’ve said in a few other comments on the Multilingual pages, I’m going to be hacking away at a new release within the next few weeks. So look for an update soon!
April 5th, 2005 at 10:33 pm
This looks very exciting! I’m testing it now but having a few problems. Looks like I’ll have to wait awhile
Please put me on your release list, and I’ll be happy to help out testing in any way I can.
June 3rd, 2005 at 5:25 pm
[…] n’t work for everybody. More later about it. And, finally, there is a very promising project by Morgan Doocy and others, still in a very pre-alpha stage. No pu […]
June 10th, 2005 at 5:21 pm
How is the work progressing. I would really love this plugin if you got it ready.
With respect and regards
TomWolf
August 1st, 2005 at 3:13 pm
Hey!
I’ve been eagerly waiting for this plugin! Sounds like the best effort on a multilingual blogging tool yet… Any release date?
January 4th, 2006 at 1:27 pm
[…] I’d like to emphasize that this plugin is very simple. It is in no way a replacement of any sort for the larger-scale multilingual efforts going on these days. I wanted to get my code cleaned up and my hacks back in the admin interface (I lost them when I upgraded WP), and I’m making the result public. […]
January 22nd, 2006 at 12:46 am
[…] My blog has been bilingual for a long time now. I’ve hacked bilingualism into it and then plugged it in. Other plugins for multilingual bloggers have been written, and some unfortunately got stuck somewhere in the development limbo. […]
June 7th, 2006 at 2:46 am
[…] Das Posting bei Morganically Grown über Multilingual hört sich gut an. Leider ist es — genauso wie die Files im Trunk — ein Jahr alt. Das Projekt scheint also inaktiv zu sein. Ob der Code läuft, muss man testen… […]
November 8th, 2006 at 4:27 pm
[…] There have been several attempts to make the multilingual blogging a reality. Probably I am not aware of every multilingual blog out there, but since the time I became involved closely with WordPress I was closely following some of them. I remember the langauge picker plugin (the site is down for a long time, do not click on the link, I put it here just for documentation purposes). Unfortunately I didn’t download it when it was available. I also noticed two bloggers, Chris and Stephanie, both of them very interested in multilingual blogging, and having implemented some kind of multilingual functionality on their blogs - though in different manner. They also have several interesting language related articles and good ideas about multilingual blogging. Later came malyfred with his Polyglot plugin. It was based on the Language Picker but brought a lot of enhancements. Seemingly the plugin is very “picky” because it doesn’t work for everybody. More later about it. And, finally, there is a very promising project by Morgan Doocy and others, still in a very pre-alpha stage. No public announcement about the progress since February. […]