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Bunny’s Language Linker: New WordPress Plugin

by Stephanie on 12.28.2007

in Languages / Linguistics, Real Live Code, Weblog Technology

[fr]

Un nouveau plugin WordPress que je viens d'écrire. Celui-ci vous permet de gérer les liens entre pages équivalentes de deux versions linguistiques d'un site. Par exemple, si vous avez http://stephanie-booth.com/en et http://stephanie-booth.com/fr (deux installations WordPress séparées!), le plugin vous aidera à faire en sorte qu'il y ait des liens entre http://stephanie-booth.com/en/about et http://stephanie-booth.com/fr/a-propos.

[en]

Ladies and Gentlemen, I’m proud to announce the WordPress plugin Bunny’s Language Linker (zip, phps).

I’ve been wanting to write this plugin for ages, and I’ve finally done it this evening. This is a plugin for people who have a WordPress site with content duplicated in more than one language, like I’m going to have with stephanie-booth.com. For example, you have an “about” page in English, and another “about” page in German. This plugin helps you create and manage links between such “sister” pages. (”Pages”, not “posts”. It doesn’t work with posts at all.)

The plugin adds an extra field to the page editing form, inviting you to input the page slug of the sister page:

Bunny's Language Linker - Admin view

The screenshot is a bit small, but there on the right, there is a little box with “a-propos” — the slug of the French sister page. It works with more than one other language, too. You just need to edit the settings in the plugin file to specify which languages you’re playing with (instructions are in the plugin file). If I had sites in 3 other languages, say French, Spanish, and German, my settings line in the plugin file would look like this:

$bll_other_languages=array('fr', 'es', 'de');

And the little box would provide three different fields for the page slugs of the different localized sites. (OK, I’m making this sound complicated, sorry.)

The plugin then automatically adds links to the sister pages you’ve indicated. Here’s what it could look like:

Bunny's Language Linker - Page view

There’s a readme file with the plugin which will give you some more details. I’ll soon have a client site in production using that plugin, so if these explanations weren’t very clear, hopefully the demonstration will help.

{ 11 trackbacks }

Climb to the Stars (Stephanie Booth) » Two Plugin Updates: Basic Bilingual 0.32 and Language Linker 0.2
01.01.2008 at 18:35
Weblog Tools Collection » Blog Archive » WordPress Plugin Releases for 1/8
01.08.2008 at 5:35
WordPress Plugin Releases for 1/8 | SATblog.info
01.08.2008 at 6:32
WordPress Plugin Releases for 1/8 | BlogBroker24-7
01.08.2008 at 8:14
Planet WordPress » Blog Arşivi » Yeni Wordpress Eklentileri 1
01.08.2008 at 8:57
Wp Wordpress » Blog Archive » WordPress Plugin Releases for 1/8
01.08.2008 at 12:12
WordPress Plugin Releases for 1/8
01.08.2008 at 19:03
Climb to the Stars (Stephanie Booth) » December 2007 Recap
01.18.2008 at 21:13
Wordpress Plugins: Listed for Jan. 2008Wordpress Plugins: Listed for Jan. 2008
02.13.2008 at 22:53
Las mejores maneras de Traducir tu Blog WordPress » sNebel - Internet, Diseño y Mucho Más
10.13.2008 at 22:27
Mas de 10 maneras de Traducir tu Blog WordPress « Todo para Blogs
10.15.2008 at 1:39

{ 13 comments… read them below or add one }

1 Leonid Mamchenkov 01.08.2008 at 8:16

Good job!

Two suggestions:

<ol>
<li>

Make the page selection a dropdown with available pages, not a textfield. Similar to the way the Page Parent is selected.

</li>
<li>

Make the plugin work with posts too.

</li>
</ol>

With the above to points implemented, it'll be a killer plugin for all of us having (or thinking about having) blogs in multiple languages. :)

2 Leonid Mamchenkov 01.08.2008 at 9:16

Good job!

Two suggestions:

  1. Make the page selection a dropdown with available pages, not a textfield. Similar to the way the Page Parent is selected.

  2. Make the plugin work with posts too.

With the above to points implemented, it’ll be a killer plugin for all of us having (or thinking about having) blogs in multiple languages. :)

3 Stephanie 01.08.2008 at 10:22

Hi Leonid,

I was thinking about using a drop-down — I guess it makes more sense.

About posts… It would only really be possible to easily implement for single post pages. And then… we bump into one of the issues with “translation blogging”: I don't think it's the best way to blog in more than one language. But well, if people want to translate everything they write, I guess it's not my place to stop them, is it?

Will keep your comments in mind for the next release.

4 Stephanie 01.08.2008 at 11:22

Hi Leonid,

I was thinking about using a drop-down — I guess it makes more sense.

About posts… It would only really be possible to easily implement for single post pages. And then… we bump into one of the issues with “translation blogging”: I don’t think it’s the best way to blog in more than one language. But well, if people want to translate everything they write, I guess it’s not my place to stop them, is it?

Will keep your comments in mind for the next release.

5 Peter Lurie 01.08.2008 at 15:45

Hi!

Nice new alternative. I actually have2 clients who indeed DO translate everything (Pages & Posts), so a post-capability would be great!

Brava, Stephanie!
Peter

6 Peter Lurie 01.08.2008 at 16:45

Hi!

Nice new alternative. I actually have2 clients who indeed DO translate everything (Pages & Posts), so a post-capability would be great!

Brava, Stephanie!
Peter

7 Andrea Vascellari 01.10.2008 at 16:30

You’ve been wanting to write this plugin for ages and I’ve been wanting to find a plugin like this for ages!

Well done!

About posts…like Leonid said it would be nice to extend it to posts too but on the other hand we need to keep in mind translation blogging issues…pretty challenging huh?! I'm sure you will come up with something in the next releases! (don't get me wrong I really love this plugin!)

Stephanie I wish you a successful 2008 + keep up the great work!

Andrea

8 Andrea Vascellari 01.10.2008 at 17:30

You’ve been wanting to write this plugin for ages and I’ve been wanting to find a plugin like this for ages!

Well done!

About posts…like Leonid said it would be nice to extend it to posts too but on the other hand we need to keep in mind translation blogging issues…pretty challenging huh?! I’m sure you will come up with something in the next releases! (don’t get me wrong I really love this plugin!)

Stephanie I wish you a successful 2008 + keep up the great work!

Andrea

9 Stephanie 01.10.2008 at 17:47

Quick hack to make it work in posts, too (but be careful, you will have to copy-paste everything after the en/ or fr/ — including the date — for example, “archives/2007/12/28/bunnys-language-linker-new-wordpress-plugin/” for this post). Add the following code at the end of the plugin somewhere:

<pre>add_action('dbx_post_sidebar', 'bll_add_slug_boxes');
</pre>

10 Stephanie 01.10.2008 at 18:47

Quick hack to make it work in posts, too (but be careful, you will have to copy-paste everything after the en/ or fr/ — including the date — for example, “archives/2007/12/28/bunnys-language-linker-new-wordpress-plugin/” for this post). Add the following code at the end of the plugin somewhere:

add_action('dbx_post_sidebar', 'bll_add_slug_boxes');
11 alank 08.21.2008 at 1:56

I’m interested in developing a way to use display:block to provide bilingual content on the same page in wordpress. A cookie setting indicating language chosen would activate the area that contains content in the chosen language.

It is easy to do this on a web page, but within wordpress, it is a challenge, I think. Have you ever considered this multilingual approach before?

12 alank 08.21.2008 at 1:56

I'm interested in developing a way to use display:block to provide bilingual content on the same page in wordpress. A cookie setting indicating language chosen would activate the area that contains content in the chosen language.

It is easy to do this on a web page, but within wordpress, it is a challenge, I think. Have you ever considered this multilingual approach before?

13 Thomas 09.03.2008 at 16:48

Hello Stephanie,

found your blog through googlewebmastercentral. Starting to localize my fresh Wordpress website thought to go with the plugin WP_Multilingual from Oleg at http://made.com.ua/multilingual/ localizing also the Wordpress theme.
To work on .po files there is a brandnew plugin at http://www.code-styling.de/deutsch/entwicklunge...

So the BIG work is to prepare the theme with the variables for the string.

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