All these solutions have their limitations, are inflexible and you go into a dependency that will be hard to get out and with each update of WordPress you have to check if the Plugin is still working or has any bugs with the new version. Therefore, I would suggest a solution that we use in our Inpsyde Team frequently for customers and maintained their strength in the flexibility, in extensibility and in its capacity to use the WordPress standard without changing the core or anything else. You can deactivate the Plugin at any time, you won't lose anything, your website remains the same.

Why multilanuage?

• 2/3, if not even more, of the worldwide population speak another language
• Globale Aufstellung von Unternehmen
• Better distribution of content
• Service for the client
• Search Engine Optimization

The solution

WordPress Multi-site provides the solution already.
This makes the management of different instances, with similarities and differences, with the help of an installation possible. The exchange of data is possible via core functions, which get united and simplified via Plugin.

Advantages

• WordPress Core Functions
• No dependency to Plugins
• Independent to WordPress development*
• Control Themes, Plugins at a central place, use them decentralized
• Low maintenance
• Seperating languages in Backend/Frontend (user dependent)
• Complete mirrored or in every content form seperated
• Subdomains or Subdirectories
• de.example.com, example.com/de
• Seperate Domains via Domainmapping
• example.de, example.com
• Free in development in design and usability
• Optimization not only on frontend, also lang-attributes, SEO

Plugin

With all these requirements and benefits, we use a base that is available as a Plugin in the official repository of WordPress: Multilingual Press . The plugin provides several convenient tools to use Multisite for the implementation of multilingualism.

This plugin simplifies the identification of different blogs in the network to a language and linking to other blogs, so that when you publish the content in blog A, it will create a post as draft in blog B. Thus, the articles are in relation, the system knows this and with the help of some functions, it may be used in the frontend and backend.
The Plugin provides in the article or page the ability to see a meta box with the content of the linked data, in the simplest case as a translation aid. Similarly, there is a widget that simplifies the frontend to change. In each blog you can be make ​​some adjustments, assigning a flag and language.

An outlook

We are in the midst of the development, which adds the extra help. For example a dashboard widget with the overview of article and all links, an extension of the mediathek to seperate global content across all blogs and independent content per blog. Similarly, there are helpers for updating existing installations. In addition there is the possibility to directly load the language in the backend, without the need of FTP/SSH and assign the languages accordingly​​. We will also add the function to copy existing blogs with all the content and options if you want to.

Summary

WordPress Multisite provides the basis and with some adjustments, a clean, controlled solution exists for the use of WordPress in a multilingual environment. Now it's up to you - use Multisite, Test the Plugin and give us a feedback, preferable on our repo on Github.

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This was our last door of our Advent Calendar. We hope you enjoyed it!

We wish you a Merry Christmas and thanks a lot for reading our posts!

Fortunately WordPress defines two constants which can help you to simplify things nonetheless: WP_PLUGIN_DIR and WP_PLUGIN_URL. These constants point to the plugin directory of the respective WordPress installation. They are defined since WordPress 2.6 and supporting older versions is most likely unnecessary
.
To make your plugins accessible to all your installed WordPress versions you simply move them to a central directory and define the constants accordingly:

define( 'WP_PLUGIN_DIR', '/var/www/plugins' ); // or with XAMPP C:/xampp/htdocs/plugins
define( 'WP_PLUGIN_URL', 'http://localhost/plugins' );

In this example the plugins reside in the directory 'plugins' in the root directory of the webserver. If you now define the above constants in every WordPress installation you have easy access to them to test your code with every version.

(Thanks to John Blackbourn on the wp-hackers list for having the idea.)

Hint for Multisite-Users

Also usable for WordPress Multisite

define( 'WPMU_PLUGIN_DIR', '/var/www/multisite-plugins' );
define( 'WPMU_PLUGIN_URL', 'http://localhost/multisite-plugins' );

This is the first time, that WordPress is going into the direction of using Core-Plugins. There are many formats available if you check out the profile of WordPress, and maybe someone can create additional importers for other formats.

The WordPress admin area often likes to show information at the top of the window. For developers, this has a great benefit: Tools for generating the error and information messages are integrated and can easily be implemented in Plugins - without any self-definitions or changes in the style sheet.

Automatically generated information in WordPress

wp_safe_redirect(
  add_query_arg(
    'updated',
    'true',
    wp_get_referer()
  )
);

Manual and more flexible solution to output a message box

<div id="message" class="updated">
  <p>
    Output
  </p>
</div>

Colorful: The availability of CSS classes

Messages within an application have to communicate different informations. For this purpose WordPress has numerous stylesheet classes available, which suits best to the message.

<div id="message" class="updated">...</div>

<div id="message" class="error">...</div>

<div id="message" class="updated highlight">...</div>

<div id="message" class="updated below-h2">...</div>

Recommendation

Don't use your own format. A common and familiar message box provides trust and increases the potential of perception.

Guest Post

This post is written by Sergej Müller wpseo.org, who created the popular WordPress Plugin to optimize your SEO.

Thank you very much from our part to Sergej.

If you also like to have your interesting post published on our website, please let us know on our contact page. Of course we will appreciate your contribution!

You can adjust and expand the options as you like. A good overview is the wp-admin/options.php.

<?php
/*
Plugin Name: Toscho's basic settings
Plugin URI: http://toscho.de/2010/wordpress-grundeinstellungen-per-plugin-setzen/
Description: Some useful default configuration settings. See 'wp-admin/options.php' for more options.
Version: 0.2
Author: Thomas Scholz
Author URI: http://toscho.de
*/

function set_toscho_defaults()
{
    $o = array(
        'avatar_default'            => 'blank',
        'avatar_rating'             => 'G',
        'category_base'             => '/thema',
        'comment_max_links'         => 0,
        'comments_per_page'         => 0,
        'date_format'               => 'd.m.Y',
        'default_ping_status'       => 'closed',
        'default_post_edit_rows'    => 30,
        'links_updated_date_format' => 'j. F Y, H:i',
        'permalink_structure'       => '/%year%/%postname%/',
        'rss_language'              => 'de',
        'timezone_string'           => 'Etc/GMT-1',
        'use_smilies'               => 0,
    );

    foreach ( $o as $k => $v )
    {
        update_option($k, $v);
    }

    // Delete dummy post and comment.
    wp_delete_post(1, TRUE);
    wp_delete_comment(1);

    return;
}
register_activation_hook(__FILE__, 'set_toscho_defaults');
?>

Here you can download the Plugin by toscho.

For the implementation, we need the active Plugins, which are found in the database, table options, the active_plugins. Afterwards, I will simply look in the array, which contains the active Plugins, whether the required plugin included and active or not:

$plugins = get_option('active_plugins');
$required_plugin = 'debug_queries/debug_queries.php';
$debug_queries_on = FALSE;
if ( in_array( $required_plugin , $plugins ) ) {
	$debug_queries_on = TRUE; // Example for yes, it's active
}

function my_update_notice() {
	$info = __( 'ATTENTION! Plugin was modified.', MY_TEXTDOMAIN );
	echo '<span class="spam">' . strip_tags( $info, '<br><a><b><i><span>' ) . '</span>';
}

if ( is_admin() )
	add_action( 'in_plugin_update_message-' . plugin_basename(__FILE__), 'my_update_notice' );

For What Reason

The competition is running until the end of July and there are only 13 submitted plugins so far. Including some great ideas. Even though every day new Plugins appear in SVN, there are just a few listed. Developers - dare you, chime into this competition. This event is an added value for users and developers, both sides can only gain from this. Sure, it's hard to compete against a professional PHP developer - but also in SVN is your code available to the public and therefore can seen by everyone. The Plugin Competition is just another platform, and should be used by beginners and pros.
It doesn't make the plugin better, but your Plugin surely gets more attention and more feedback, as I have experienced in the past year. This year should be at least the same amount of feedback as last year, where each plugin was inspect by OZH. Also this year, you can expect to get some feedback from Ozh as you can see at contribution to the Plugin Competition. Sure, the opinion of Ozh can be different then yours, but his feedback is crucial. As a developer, I have learned a lot from last year, my knowledge expanded.

The competition doesn't cost you extra time. Your plugin will receive an additional platform and will be evaluated. Additionally, you can also win some prices and get recognition. Therefore - join in!

Sponsoring

The competition is a wonderful platform for people who want promote their product in front of a big WordPress user audience. It is a great opportunity for Theme and Plugin authors, agencies, and hosting services, etc. - sponsor the competition and get attention.

Our German Community

WP Engineer is driven by a German team and therefore it would be great to see more Plugins from German developers. As of now there are 2 German Plugins in the competition. I hope there will participating a third Plugin soon. Because it deserves attention. I hope there will be more German Plugin developers in this competition and German users, who are voting for their favorite Plugin. A great opportunity to show how big and alive the German WordPress community is.

• Changelogger by Oliver Schlöbe
• Debug Objects, by me.

The developers of WordPress will surely have an eye on this competition. It wouldn't be the first time a Plugin find it's way in the WordPress core or the solution of a Plugin was better than the solution in the core.

The work of every author is different and the dashboard is the center of information. Therefore we have decided to supplement a widget in the Dashboard, which shows the last five drafts of all authors. I enhanced the existing Plugin Draft Feed.

• It provides a feed of all drafts
• And the last 5 drafts of all authors in the Dashboard.

Everybody who needs something like this, can download this Plugin from my German Blog. It doesn't have any options and doesn't exist in SVN of WordPress - if you want you can use and expand it or leave a comment if you have a question. Enjoy!

The Plugin works with WordPress 2.7 or higher. It will be published on the repository of wordpress.org soon, but if you need it immediately, you can download it on Heiko's website (Plugin is in English, the post is in German).