TOP 8 articles about Installation

If you are implementing Language Switcher in a single wordpress installation this step by step guide is for you. Single website implementation is recommend for small website or when you only need to translate the content section but you keep the same global settings. Let’s first do the global setup > Go to yourwebiste.net/wp-admin/admin.php?page=language-switcher > Make sure you have checked English and your second language then save. > After that move to the Tab called “Settings” and check Post and Page in the post types. You can come back to the bellow section “Default URLs” once you have created your home pages for both languages. Create a translated page > From the dashboard add a new Page and put your translated content with the shortcode [language-switcher] at the beginning of the text. > Select the language of this page in the sidebar and copy/paste the url of the english version in the english url section. > Save your page and check the preview. You should see a language selector at the beginning of the content with the english url. > Now edit the english page, mark it as english, copy/paste the url of the translated page in the according section… Read More

This decision is for you to make depending on your environment, how big is the website, how you will maintain it and also perhaps on your SEO strategy. 1 – separated implementations fr.mydomain.net, en.mydomain.net mydomain.us, mydomain.es, mydomain.fr mydomain.net/fr/, mydomain.net/en/ Pros: separated databases, dedicated home page, dedicated settings per language Cons : not centralized, multi website maintenance, some duplicated settings Recommend for large website with multiple people involved or woocommerce implementation. 2 – single implementation mydomain.net/en/page-title/, mydomain.net/fr/titre-de-page/ mydomain.net/category/en/category-title/, mydomain.net/category/fr/titre-de-categorie/ In the page structure you could create a parent page for each language, mydomain.net/en/, mydomain.net/es/ and use them as parent of the translated version for example. In the category structure you could create a parent category for each language mydomain.net/category/en/, mydomain.net/category/fr/ and use them as parent category for the translated category. You can also replace the folder “category” by something more generic like “c” or “cat” in your permalink settings, this is up to you. Pros: centralized databases, fast implementation of a translated page, manageable by one person, easy to make changes across a group of translated contents because the plugin can synchronize the changes that belong to the same installation. Cons : less flexibility in terms of settings and url structure,… Read More

The Language Switcher allows you to add dropdown list of urls pointing to a translated version of the current page. This plugin do not provide translation features or multi-version like WPML or Weglot. You can totally use it together with WPML or Weglot however we strongly recommend you to keep all languages separated from each other by simply implementing one WP site per language and use the language switcher as navigation tool between all the installations, like wikipedia does in its sidebar. If you chose to implement multi-language from the same site without any other translation plugin the plugin will take care of switching the default language of the site depending on the language of the current url. It means that when you will be reading the spanish version for example, the auto generated contents (date, plugin translations, core translations…) will also be shown in spanish. Following the same logic the Menu will filter only the spanish urls and the WP_Query will show only spanish contents in the case tag clouds and list of categories. Once you activate the post types (post, page, product….) and/or taxonomies (tag, category, attribute…) in the Language settings you can then add language urls when… Read More