Fabio Tinelli Roncalli

I have been using Gengo for quite a long time to provide two different version of my blog, one in italian and the other, less frequently updated, in English. This is the so called multilingual blogging. Gengo is a Wordpress plugin which provides a complete framework for multilingual blogging. It detects the visitors’ language and gives them the appropriate content, providing links to the translations and changing also all the template names.

A working and complex multilingual site based on Gengo is Wp-Multilingual. However Gengo is no more active developed and it breaks under the latest version of Wordpress. So I had to uninstall and I have been lookin for alternatives.

As a temporary fix I am now using the Advanced Category Excluder plugin. While not originally intended for multilingual blogging it allows to hide all the post from a category from the home page. I can put my english posts under a ” English” category and hide them from my main home page (dedicated to italian speaking users). The category archive becomes the home page for english users. The english posts are hidden from the RSS feed, too. One important thing is missing: the automatic redirection based on the language in the user’s browser, but this can easily be achieved with a redirect in the .htaccess file.

There are also a couple of other dedicated plugins (I have tested none of them yet) which should work on WP 2.3:

• Language Switcher from Poplarware seems to have a lot of features.
• Polyglot seems to work in a similar way but a bit simpler.

So you basically have three options:

1. Keeping two separate blogs: this is the simplest thing but the less integrated. You have to change everything twice (from theme changes to wordpress upgrades), but is a robust and less error prone option.
2. Keeping a separate category in your blog for each language different from the main language. This allows to keep just one wordpress installation, but requires some additional plugins and server side hacking. I have not yet managed to translate also the theme stuff for the special “language” category
3. Using a multilingual plugin like Gengo or Language Switcher/Polyglot. The Gengo approach is very powerful but it is more likely to cause problem and incompatibility (both with others plugins and with wordpress upgrades, but I also noticed some problems with SEO causing a drop in PageRank). Language Switcher is simpler but less powerful.

I really hope that the Wordpress Team can integrate some multilingual capabilities or at least make a multilingual options of Wordpress (like the Multiuser version).