Multilanguage advice – Genesis/bbPress etc.

[ZeroGravity]

This is my first foray into the ML arena and I have been reading everything about WordPress/Genesis/Multilingual and have succeeded in getting myself totally confused in which direction to head. Whether to go multisite or WPML route. My client would like a site in English and Spanish with following capabilities.

1) Posts & Pages
2) Forum - using bbPress?
3) Website subscribers enter reports - use Custom Post types or Gravity Forms? The reports need to be reviewed by the site admins.

I would appreciate any advice on which way would the best way to set this up.

Many Thanks!

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Darren Burns
Zero Gravity Web Works

[cdils]

Hi Darren,

First, let me lower your expectations by telling you I'm no expert in Multisite or multi-lingual sites, BUT I've asked some experts to take a peek at your question and chime in.

For starters, the consensus from pros is to use Multisite, with unique sites for each language.

Generally speaking, it's probably easiest to set up one site in it's entirety and then duplicate it and translate it - that way you avoid repeating some of those basic setup options.

bbPress is great for forums.

A combination of a custom post type and gravity forms could be an ideal way to have users submit data from the front-end and then keep it in "draft" or "pending review" mode until it's been approved. That's *if* you want to eventually display that custom post type (the report or whatever) on the site. If you don't want to display it on the site and just need a method for sending in data and having it approved, you could probably eliminate the custom post type piece.

Cheers,
Carrie

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Have you been helped in this forum? Pay it forward and answer someone else’s question. I bet you’ll know the answer to at least one question. 🙂

I host a weekly WordPress-focused podcast called Office Hours. I tweet @cdils.

[cdils]

One more piece of advice that came in off of Twitter:

@cdils @andrea_r Also, Ron and Andrea’s Replicator plugin works great to make identical copies of sites to start from.

— Stéphane Bergeron (@pixelyzed) April 20, 2014

Try the Replicator plugin -> http://wpebooks.com/replicator/

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Have you been helped in this forum? Pay it forward and answer someone else’s question. I bet you’ll know the answer to at least one question. 🙂

I host a weekly WordPress-focused podcast called Office Hours. I tweet @cdils.

[ZeroGravity]

Carrie,

Thank you so much for digging into this for me! It looks like multi-site is the way to go then. I think I will post this over on the twitter thread as well but are they meaning avoid the multi-site, mutli-language plugins as well? i.e. Multisite Language Switcher and Multilingual Press

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Darren Burns
Zero Gravity Web Works

[webfocusdesign]

Responded on Twitter but the 140 chars limit is annoying for this.

As I said there, I know of but haven't used Multilingual Press. I believe I've tried it ages ago but can't remember why I didn't end up using it.

I do use Multisite Language Switcher on every multilingual site I build though. It makes the different sites work together much like WPML would but without the overhead... or the problems. Link the same page between sites, create a new page in another language site if it doesn't exist, etc. Very easy to use, lightweight and has very useful hooks.

I see that Multilingual Press has several features that MLS doesn't. MLS is a very focused little plugin. Does exactly what it's supposed to and no more. I like that. But I'll give MP another go soon for sure.

Don't hesitate to ask additional questions here or on Twitter 🙂

[ZeroGravity]

Thanks Stéphane! I imagine I may have some questions as I start developing the site.

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Darren Burns
Zero Gravity Web Works

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