Avoid managing multilingual content unless it is absolutely essential. Creating the content is at least double the work, or even more with several languages. Ofcourse an automated google tranlation is an option, but the output – without manual revision – will be full with errors.
Technically, once a multilingual content management system had been installed, publishing is easy, but keep in mind that every posts needs tagging and a category and even a meta-description for good search engine visability.
My first attempts of making websites in multiple languages did not work out well with static sites. Copying html pages, messing up the menu trees. Next, when I took over the administration of my fathers website, it was a static html page, made with frontpage. To convert its content to a dynamic content management system, I used joomla with joomfish, because at the time I could not find a properly working plugin for wordpress. I got it up and running, but I find joomla so hard and timeconsuming to work with, that I was glad to find a plugin for wordpress that does the job.
WordPress Multisite with the Language Switcher Plugin
I had the wordpress multilingual switcher first installed at my personal site. It requires a multisite installation of wordpress, linking clones of the framework in a smooth way. As mentioned above, publishing content in multiple languages is a tedious job, and it was preventing me from regularly posting updates, that is why I choose to only use english for my weblog.
For my fathers site now I could now set up and migrate the joomla content to the wordpress multilingual multisite installation. I am currently working on that, but you can have a look already. More on that site later.
