Multilingual WordPress Done Right

In the Q & A part of his latest talk The Future of WordPress is Global at WordCamp San Francisco, WordPress core developer Andrew Nacin said that writing multilingual content is kind of like the pipe dream pie in the sky idea. I’m not really sure why he said that, but he continued that there are a lot of plugins out there who do this, although he would argue probably none of them well, only because WordPress core doesn’t make it easy for them to do this.

According to Nacin there’s a really great plugin called Babble that’s been in development by the folks at Code for the People. That plugin kind of does it like the way WordPress would do it. So if WordPress would ever have the chance to do multilingual in core, that’s probably how it would be and right now it’s something you can use. It seems to me that he said this before he knew that Automattic would acquire Code for the People. They have just joined the WordPress.com VIP Team at Automattic and it seems that Babble will sooner or later become part of WordPress core.

In an interview with TechCruch last week, Matt Mullenweg explained that

Babble was one of the key parts of the deal. In Europe, many countries require multilingual versions of their sites, “and that’s actually a lot harder to build than you think,” he said. Babble effectively helps companies create dual (or more) versions of the same site in different languages.

At WordCamp Andrew Nacin concluded his answer to the first question by saying that multilingual content is definitely going to happen (in core) at some point, but there’s a lot of different markers that probably need to happen first for it to make sense for each of these steps to occur. So this does not sound like within the next couple of releases. Prove me wrong! But if the already existing Babble plugin really works with WooCommerce there might not even be a need for it to be part of core. The README on GitHub states that the plugin is at a beta stage (although already tagged with v1.4.4) for translating:

• Posts
• Pages
• Custom post types
• Categories
• Tags
• Custom taxonomies.

It is powering a live site at http://freespeechdebate.com/. The plugin was built with an aversion to both additional database tables, additional columns or column changes and a desire to keep additional queries to a minimum. The plugin is (in theory) compatible with WordPress.com VIP and was built with this platform in mind.

That being said, the first thing I’m going to dive into over the weekend is Babble. It’s pretty strange that I had never heard of it until Nacin mentioned it in his talk. We’ve been using WPML for many client projects, mainly because it seems to be the plugin that best supports WooCommerce, although I like Polylang more, because it’s leaner.

What’s your favorite multi language plugin for WordPress? And if you have used Babble before, what’s your experience with it?