[okfn-help] Multilingual support for OKFN sites?

Thu Mar 15 20:47:03 UTC 2012

On 28 February 2012 13:05, Kat Braybrooke <kat.braybrooke at okfn.org> wrote:
> Hi guys,
>
> As the OKFN becomes more international, we've been welcoming new regional
> groups and chapters to use our Wordpress blogfarm - and several of these
> have mentioned having problems applying non-Latin language characters to our
> sites. An example of such issues is on our Github here
> https://github.com/okfn/wordpress-theme-okfn/issues/14

This issue seems to have nothing to do with multi-lingualism per se
but to do with our theme ...

Also, to check: what is it people need to do? Do we need 'full'
multilingual (i.e. multiple languages versions of the same text). Most
of the multilingual plugins are about doing this but if we just need
better support for character sets that a different matter.

> Charalmpos from the OKFN:LOCAL Greece group (CC'd here) has recommended that
> we use a paid plug-in like http://wpml.org which makes it easy to work with
> multilingual sites (and has 40 language options). The only problem with this
> is that it's proprietary, which we all have qualms about.

We really do prefer non-proprietary for this. Also before we spend
money (and more importantly effort) installing and configuring this we
probably need a little bit clear idea of exactly what hte problem is
and what the needs are going forward ...

> There are other options here
> https://codex.wordpress.org/Multilingual_WordPress (thanks Rufus) but I'm
> not sure which one would be best. Does anyone else have experience with
> using multilingual support Wordpress plugins, or an opinion on which one we
> decide to use?

This might be better on okfn-discuss rather than okfn-help and it also
might be a question for the wordpress forums.

BTW: I appreciate it can be a bit frustrating to take a decision on
this but these are reasonably complex technical matters and generally
involve non-trivial cost.

I should also say that the sysadmin team have discussed the problem of
resourcing wordpress support -- to be clear we only have one
designated sysadmin at the moment for this sort of thing (Nils) and he
only does ~2d per week (though we hvae a hosting provider who deals
with core support like OS upgrades, backups etc). The rest of the
sysadmin-ing on wordpress is done in bits of people's time.

Rufus

> Thanks :) Kat
>
> | Kat Braybrooke | Community Coordinator
> | Global Chapters and OKFestival
> | Open Knowledge Foundation | London
> | OKFN.org | Twitter @kat_braybrooke
>
>
>
>
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