thomas.speaking

I want to find out if I can use Wordpress as a CMS. A quick search on the web will definitely give you some results how to do this but I wanted to try it myself with a little project and see if this is easy to accomplish…

Our current website at Cantillana uses an ASP.NET CMS; DotNetNuke. Can I convert our current website, running DotNetNuke, to Wordpress without any loss of functionality?

BUT there are already 2 problems I’m worried about:

1. Each page has a banner at the top with rotating images. The banner should be configurable for each page (different images per page).
2. Migrate our product information to Wordpress.

Setup

To start this project, I’ve setup a virtual webserver with VirtualBox and OpenSuSE 11.2. I will not explain how to setup such a webserver because there are enough articles about this subject on the web:

• The perfect server – OpenSuSE
• 20 ways to secure your Apache configuration
• …

Once the webserver was set up and the Wordpress installation was complete, I could start my project.

Support multiple languages

What would be the first step in our project?
Because our project needs to be available in different languages, we need to find a way to make Wordpress multilingual which isn’t supported by default.

DotNetNuke doesn’t support multilingual content either. You can install different languages but writing different content per language isn’t possible. There is a module available from someone in the DotNetNuke-community…

But we’re lucky! There is already a plugin available (and an excellent one) to let our Wordpress speak different languages; WPML. After the installation of this plugin, an extra item is available in your dashboard.

The first thing you should do is select your default language; in my case it’s Dutch. When writing a new post, it will show this language first.

In the next configuration step, you can choose the other languages your Wordpress CMS needs to support. In my project, this would be English and French.

There is one little problem though. As you may know (or not), there are 2 primary languages in Belgium; Dutch and French. I need to find a way to seperate the language French into French (France) and French (Belgium). But unfortunately, WPML doesn’t support this feature yet.

When writing a new post, you can see in the screenshot above that a new option is available. After writing the post in our default language, you can easily translate this post into the other languages…

Off course our visitor needs to choose his/her preferred language.
With one PHP-function we can easily integrate this into our theme; either by a drop-down menu or through hyperlinks (with or without little flags). The active language isn’t shown in the language switcher.

<?php
if ( function_exists( ‘icl_post_languages’ ) ) {
icl_post_languages();
}
?>

And this is how it looks:

Our Wordpress CMS is now speaking different languages and I must say (because of the good documentation) this was a much easier process compared to DotNetNuke. But we’re lacking one important feature off course; setting the language per country.

In my next post I will try to create a plugin to recreate the banner with the rotating images from our original site with DotNetNuke.