The plugin offers a way to maintain dynamic multilingual content on a WordPress site. While static localization is already excellently implemented and offered by WordPress framework through po/mo file framework, it is still impossible to maintain dynamic multilingual content without an additional specialized plugin, a kind of which qTranslate-X belongs to. For example, what if you need to make title, content and excerpt of a page to be multilingual? In theory, it could be handled by po/mo files, but in an insanely inconvenient way.
To deal with dynamic content, qTranslate-X provides language switching buttons on applicable admin editing pages, which, once pressed, make all the text of multilingual fields to be filled with the language chosen. The instant language change happens locally in your browser without sending an additional request to the server, which makes it most convenient for bi-lingual or few-lingual sites, for example, owners of which perform the translation of content on their own. qTranslate-X does not provide a way to translate static strings, assuming that this part is already implemented and handled by the WordPress localization framework.
The plugin provides a way to designate which fields on a page or post are to be multilingual. Once a field is declared multilingual, it will be distinguishably highlighted (in a customizable way) on admin side. At frontend, the value of active language, as defined by a page viewer, is extracted from multilingual field to be displayed within HTML context. Thus, a concept of multilingual field is in use here, as opposite to a concept of whole separate page or separate site for each language, as it is done in a number of other multilingual content management plugins, see, for example, free Polylang or paid WPML. Each plugin has its own pros and cons, please, choose carefully the one which suits your needs the best.
Plugin qTranslate-X provides a convenient way to describe which fields need to be multilingual through a JSON-encoded configuration file as described in Integration Guide. It makes it easy to integrate your theme or other plugins with qTranslate-X. A JSON-encoded file, named i18n-config.json, such as the one used by qTranslate-X itself, may be provided by themes and plugins within their distribution. Plugin qTranslate-X picks up and load those configuration files on activation of a plugin or on the switch of a theme. Such a configuration file can potentially be employed by any other multilingual plugin. The developers are encouraged to contact us to discuss a common standard for the i18n-config.json configuration file.
The plugin does not currently offer any kind of translation services. The team has conducted an online survey to find out how people translate their content. You are welcome to make your entry too. It appears so far, that translation service is not an immediate need. Administrators normally have their ways to translate the content, but they need a convenient way to enter translated content into an appropriate place, which this plugin is designed to help for. Translation services might still be provided in the future releases as a paid feature.
Plugin qTranslate-X makes creation of multilingual content as easy as working with a single language. Here are some features:
- One-click local switching between the languages - Changing the language as easy as switching between Visual and HTML.
- Comes with a number of languages already built-in - English, German, Simplified Chinese, for example, and many more.
- Language customizations without changing the .po/mo files - It stores all the translations in the same post fields, while shows it to user for editing one by one depending on the language to edit chosen.
- In-line syntax '
[:en]English Text[:de]Deutsch[:]' or '<!--:en-->English Text<!--:--><!--:de-->Deutsch<!--:-->' for theme-custom fields gets them translated - See FAQ for more information. - Language tag encoding allows strings like this '
[:en]English Text[:]<html-language-neutral-code>[:de]Deutsch[:]<another-html-language-neutral-code>', with language-neutral text embedded. - Multilingual dates out of the box - translates dates and time for you.
- Theme custom fields can be configured to be translatable too.
- Choose one of a few modes to make your URLs look pretty and SEO-friendly, for example, the simple and beautiful
/en/foo/, or nice and neaten.yoursite.com, or everywhere compatible?lang=en. - One language for each URL - Users and SEO will thank you for not mixing multilingual content.
- qTranslate-X supports unlimited number of languages, which can be easily added/modified/deleted via a comfortable Configuration Page at Settings->Languages.
- Custom CSS for "qTranslate Language Chooser" widget configurable via its properties.
- Menu item "Language Switcher" to enable language choosing from a menu.
- To generate language-specific sitemaps for better SEO support, use Google XML Sitemaps or 'XML Sitemaps' under Yoast SEO. Please, report a successful use of other sitemap plugins.
The website qTranslate-X explained provides and keeps updated a few useful listings:
- The list of plugins, which provide integration of qTranslate-X with other popular plugins.
- The list of some plugins reported to be compatible with qTranslate-X without an additional integrating plugin.
- The list of some plugins reported not to be currently compatible with qTranslate-X.
- The list of Know Issues.
If you encounter a conflicting plugin, please let us know, and meanwhile try to use other plugin of similar functionality, if possible.
This plugin has started as a descendant of qTranslate, which has apparently been abandoned by the original author, Qian Qin. At this point, qTranslate-X has many new features and hardly resembles its ancestor. Neither it is a straightforward compatible with older plugin. One will need to carefully read Migration Guide in order to switch a site from old qTranslate to qTranslate-X.
You may still find some useful information through reading qTranslate's original documentation, which is not duplicated here in full. There are also other plugins, which offer multilingual support, but it seems that Qian Qin has a very good original back-end design, and many people have been pleasantly using his plugin ever since. It stores all translations in the same single post, which makes it easy to maintain and to use it with other plugins. However, the user interface of former qTranslate got out of sync with the recent versions of WordPress, especially after WP went to TinyMCE 4. There is a number of forks of qTranslate, see for example, mqTranslate, qTranslate Plus and zTranslate. They all try to fix qTranslate's user interface preserving its original back-end, which is what this plugin does too. This plugin is a hybrid of all of them and fixes a few bugs in each of them. It also has many new features too, like theme custom translatable fields, for example. We hope that this plugin is the most complete working version which combines the best features of qTranslate, mqTranslate, qTranslate Plus and zTranslate.
We organized an anonymous entity qTranslate Team to maintain a joint authority of all qTranslate-ish plugins. Anyone is welcome to join with a contribution. Participating plugin authors should share the support efforts for each other.
GitHub repository is available: https://github.com/qTranslate-Team/qtranslate-x.git.
We thank our sponsors for persistent help and support:
- Citizens Law Group
- Gunu (Marius Siroen)
- Lightbulb Web Agency
- OptimWise
- Pedro Mendonça
- pictibe Werbeagentur