Maybe my worldview is diferent to many people, but I consider that if you want to reach a large number of people, you cannot limit yourself to one single language. Given that one of my goals is to
make sure that this experience can help other people get familiar with the ins and outs of the platforms I will be using, it is highly important that the site can be read by people in different languages.
Now, this eventually comes down to a resources & budget decision. I know that, personally, I’m able to write content both in English and Spanish (I am the resource). Other languages … well that’s a separate story. For the time being I will focus on these two with the goal of not spending money (as my budget is close to 0).
Now, how can I do a WordPress multilingual install from just core? Well… I found this post, and I get the idea, but I don’t love the idea.
Let me summarize it this way:
- Because basically each language is its own installation, if I were to add a third language I would have to install a new site and setup all configuration.
- I wouldn’t have a way to easily move between translations of the same item so managing the links (menus) becomes a hassle.
- If I delete a post, then the translations don’t get deleted. The same as if I make a change.
- Categories and tags are not synced, this is a manual process.
- Media library items will get duplicated, so I could end up blowing up the disk space.
Based on this and with the final goal of an eventual Drupal migration, this approach would requiere me to handle a set of conditions that makes that migration somewhat more cumbersome.
So, what options do we have left? Apparently not much with just WordPress core. This is annoying and in my opinion, it doesn’t make sense that such feature is not available from core and to make it possible in a more usable we have to resort to a plugin.
For my next post I’ll talk about what plugins I found and what I decided to go with (trying to keep cost as low as possible) and see if it is possible to end up with a solution I find acceptable at least until I setup the Drupal project.