WordPress Multi-site with Multi-language using WPML

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I have a project with WordPress for a multi-language, multi-country site.

I want to have a structure like:

  • domain.com
  • domain.com/es
  • domain.com/de
  • domain.com/fr


  • domain.es

  • domain.es/en


  • domain.fr

  • domain.fr/en


  • domain.de

  • domain.de/en

I was wondering if anyone had any useful articles, tips or insights. The idea is that the .com site be the 'parent' site. The other satellite sites would be in their native language by default, but might have other languages available. Ideally, each individual satellite site could have some leeway to have styles/content that would be different than the parent site.

I also want the parent site to use canonicalization, so that the 'satellite' (country-specific, top-level-domain) sites have priority.

I guess I'm most curious to know about:

  • Domain mapping and compatibility with WMPL

Thanks

2

There are 2 answers

1
Dan On

I use "Polylang" in all my projects and it works perfect for me. Polylang does 2 things:

1) Creates siblings for post and pages, connected through ID, so you may write a post in english and then a "spanish sibling" with different contents but connected to the other, so when you do the language switch it displays the desired languahe.

2) Automatically creates a sub route in your WordPress URL (like yourdomain.com/en and yourdomain.com/es) so it matches and changes the desired language interface. You may even use functions on your templates to switch some contents by language on the same template file. You may add and define as many languages as you want.

Important: this is not a plugin for "auto translate" contents, its more like an option to create multilingual sites.

You may find Polylang here: Download Polylang from WordPress Plugins

If you're interested on using Polylang on your templates, here you could find a solution for calling different contents according to the language selected by the user: Multiple headers by language using Polylang

I hope this work for you.

Greetings!

3
belakbox On

I want to like WPML because I purchased it, but it just never works well for me and I always end up using Polylang.

update I recently used WPML for project and the latest version worked extremely well for me. Polylang is still great and my latest experience with WPML is even better than Polylang.