Wordpress-based multi-site front-end

Wordpress is an open source chosen as a web technology for creating a network of regional sites by using multisite feature, as most of the partners are already familiar with it.

Wordpress Multisite Network is a collection of countries sites that can share themes and plugins. The individual country sites in the network are virtual site in the sense that they do not have their own directories on your server, although they do have separate directories for media uploads within the shared installation, and they do have separate tables in the database.

First of all, to install Wordpress multisite, we need to consider a network installation should be subdomains or subfolders? After discussion, we decided to set up the network site as subdomains.

The website address will be:

• Mekong: opendevelopmentmekong.net
• Cambodia: cambodia.opendevelopmentmekong.net
• Laos: laos.opendevelopmentmekong.net
• Myanmar: myanmar.opendevelopmentmekong.net
• Thailand: thailand.opendevelopmentmekong.net
• Vietnam: vietnam.opendevelopmentmekong.net

Each network sites will be developed in two languages English and Local language. There are a few interesting WP plugins that can be used to create dual language sites. WPML (commercial plugin) which a popular Wordpress language plugin is chosen to manage the different language versions of a site’s contents.

However, switching to use WPML plugin, there are some challenges for ODC as the site currently has been using qTranlate which is a free plugin to manage multilingual contents between English and Khmer version.

• qTranslate plugin (V 2.5.39 ) is using to create languages site (Khmer and English), but now it no longer supported and it also not compatible with new version of Wordpress.
• Magic Field Plugin (V 2.3) is using to create custom fields and Custom Post Type and taxonomy in Wordpress ODC site.
• There are at least 6 different post types have been crated to manage different contents on the site such as News articles, Laws, Publications, Downloading maps, Briefings, Videos, and Blogs.
• Many posts/pages

• qTransate plugin (V 2.5.39 ) inserts different contents of all languages in a post/page by using special tags (meta tags) for each languages like <!–:en–>here text<!–:–> <!–:kh–>Khmer text<!–:–>
• Contrarily, WPML inserts all languages content in different posts/pages and linked together automatically via the plugin.
• Too many posts/pages and terms

• Install WPML (2.6) on test site.
• Import data from current site to test site
• Install qTranslate Cleanup and WPML Import plugin, developed by WPML team, to split the posts into individual post of each language. This plugin, will clean all Meta language tags from qTranslate content, and will convert the content to WPML.
• Converting is unsuccessful.

• Sometimes, converting with qTranslate to WPML importer errors with status “working”
• qTranslate to WPML importer works with Tags, Posts and pages only, but not Terms (custom taxonomy).

In Dec 04, 2014, the new version of qTranslate Cleanup and WPML Import (1.4) and WPML (3.1.8.4) released, we tested again with the new version of qTranslator plugin (2.5.39) too, but we still get the same results.

We tried to report the errors to the WPML Team, we got replying from their team at the first time, but later no. Due of less supporting from the WPML team, we looked for the other multilingual plugin. mqTranslator plugin is considered as a good alternative plugin which is a fork of the well-known qTranslate plugin, extending the original software with collaborative and team-oriented features. In additional, as it is based on qTranslate plugin, so converting is not cause many challenges as wpml.