Syde’s (@inpsyde) Christian Leucht and Thorsten Frommen introduced us to their project “Managing Multilingual Content with WordPress Multisite” for the CloudFest Hackathon.
Transcript (auto generated)
Simon:
What’s your project called and what is it all about?
Christian:
Our project is managing multilingual content with WordPress Multisite.
And basically it’s to reduce the technical complexity of Multisite and make it more available for everyone.
So the normal user, not a technical engineer or developer, should be able to set up Multisite and then manage its content,which is in multiple languages, basically.
Simon:
Multisite mode in WordPress has been there for like, since 3.0 and WordPress, WordPress Coastal, basically like forever.
And it’s always been quite hard to deal with.
So I think I have a slide deck about multi-site and the first slide is, don’t do it, get out of here. So this is what you’re tryingto solve, right?
Christian:
Kind of, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it’s really hard because you need to edit multiple files like the WP config, HD access,server configuration, maybe.
So that’s quite hard to do for a normal user, especially when you don’t have access to the hosting environment, to the filesystem.
Them so um our goal is to like yeah make it easier as easy as possible like just have a button in the back end convert singlesite to multi-site and here we go and then based on that that’s the starting point and if we solve that then the rest is like noteasy but we can start from there right we can set up new languages new sites the back end easier to manage for the usersand it also includes like updating the documentation so the awareness of multi-site um it’s not really there So yeah, we needto teach the people, basically.
Simon:
Multilanguage is in the title. Why does that matter for languages?
Christian:
I guess it matters if you have a lot of content and a lot of languages.
And so you have a lot of posts translated into multiple languages.
And you have maybe even editorial teams, so users who should only access a specific language.
And multi-site is a way to manage that. So you have the separation.
You have user accounts. you can define what role does a user have in a specific site or language context do they haveaccess at all and then you have like clear separation for the content so if for some reason you want to move out onelanguage you can do that because you only have content in that language and content is like posts and pages but also termsanything that you can see on the front end or for administration in the back end if you think about users there’s metainformation for For example, an author might have a biography. You want to be able to translate that.
So it is about managing, administering multilingual content, but also, of course, performance.
So those are, I guess, two primary reasons.
Simon:
What’s your goal for this hackathon? Because it seems to be like this is going to be a project that will continue afterthis weekend.
So where do you hope to end up after the hackathon or by the end of the hackathon?
Thorsten:
Yeah, that’s true. So Multilingual for WordPress Core is phase four.
And we are at the beginning of phase three. So it’s really just conceptual at the moment.
And our main goal was really to have a group of diverse people ask all the questions like how have you used Multisite,what was easy and what is not, and why do not more people use it?
Like what problems do we need to solve or hurdles do we need to like lower or really move out of the way?
So we have done a lot of talking, a lot of writing documentation.
Implementation um and we are like we would like to have like a proof of concepts click dummy maybe even code projectsum but yeah the the plan was really like to kick start this idea um and we also are thinking about writing a proposal for likethe make block for the wider wordpress ecosystem to just get awareness buy-in and of course people um telling us whatcould all go wrong and why why that’s a bad idea.
So yeah, just start that and try and keep momentum.
Simon:
As an avid user of WordPress multisite, I mean, literally this recording will be published on a multi-site.
I’m really looking forward to that and I hope this goes a long way to improve the experience. Thank you so much.
Christian:
Thank you as well.