Multilingual Blog

From today this blog will finally be in two languages: German and English. It took me quite a while to fathom how to operate the program and find/install the necessary plugins and therefore I feel it may be helpful to share this precious knowledge with the web community… How to upgrade WordPress to a multilingual blog?!

I warmly recommend the following link: 5 Plugins To Build A Multilingual Website. The author of this article excellently describes which plugins are available for multilingual blogs and how they work with WordPress. After I read this article plus its comments I decided to go with WPML. The installation was quite straight forward, and it seems to work perfectly.

One thing I had to compromise was the fact I had no choice but to abandon the free service of WordPress.com and find a server from which I could operate WordPress.org. For this necessary change I checked WordPress’s support site Hosting and found various hosts listed there. It didn’t take long to decide to sign up with DreamHost, since they offered in my opinion the best value for money (3,95 US$ per month), and the new domain is also inclusive.

The whole process didn’t take longer than 2 hours, and soon I had my new web address online and everything was up and running. However, I selected a new theme so that my regular readers can decide whether they read on the old site format or the new, but I would believe that this multilingual plugin would have worked just as well with the old theme.

Actually there is not much more to explain, since everyone who has just a little experience with blogging programs, should, after reading the provided links, be able to get a multilingual blog running under WordPress.org. Nevertheless let me give you the individual steps in order to make it even easier to change from a non-language-supported blog to a multilingual WordPress blog in just two hours.

1. Hosting – Read WordPress’ support site with links for various hosts (if you are not already running your own WordPress.org blog)

2. Sign up with one of the hosting providers as for example with DreamHost – who is the Web host I decided to sign up with

3. Go through the sign up procedure, chose a domain name, pay for the service and then wait patiently until the host has processed your application

4. After receiving the confirmation email log-in into the hosting provider’s web site and install WordPress.org on the server (One Click installation) and follow the steps as described

5. Visit following website which describes various plugins for multilingual WordPress blogs 5 Plugins To Build A Multilingual Website

6. Install you chosen plugin as for example WPML which I chose.

FINISHED!

Now the less exciting part follows as there will be obviously the need to translate all your articles into the new language and update the database accordingly. This is what I’ll be doing for the next few days (or even weeks!) as I have 71 articles to translate from German into English 🙁

I wish you the best of luck!