Site transfer and multilingual WordPress: our challenges

When our project was born in 2019, the name “PlusBrothers” was chosen rather than Italian translation for “Positive World” as we had multilingual in mind from the beginning. But to implement it in reality there was too much effort and we gave it up for a long time.

However, technology, over time, has proven us wrong by allowing advances we previously did not even dream of.

Site transfer

We started with a low-cost website but as we developed the blog we increasingly realized we had greater needs than we could meet by staying there, so in 2021 we switched to a professional service.

It met our operational needs perfectly except for the price, which became unaffordable in the long run, and we eventually decided to migrate after identifying a provider offering same service, but more compatible with the our money availability.

In theory, all data was supposed to be transferred from old space to new one in a matter of minutes and thereafter we would be off-line for a week i.e., the technical and bureaucratic time of the domain ownership transfer, independent of our will; but since bad luck always knows where to strike, the old provider did not allow migration to the new one and we had to do it on our own.

Having also failed the manual migration for reasons we still ignore, we found ourselves with the site actually online but on which it was impossible to make any changes.

All right, we were in trouble and were left with only two options: claim damages or start over by building a new site – of course we had safely stored content and none of our writing was lost.

Lawyers, courts, compensation? Economically, it was not feasible to retaliate against the old provider, and besides, we were not going to spend a lifetime arguing with Internet service providers.

Rather, better use our money to pay a skilled person who could help us with site’s restyling, and this time fooling around was no longer permitted.

A new way to work

Redesigning our site was an idea we had been delaying for a long time given the amount of work it would mean, but finally the time had come: we got in touch with Gloria Liuni, a web designer and trainer in the WordPress community; she knew our blog and believed in us from the very beginning, after we met in a Facebook group where we discussed web development issues. So if we received trust from her, why not reciprocate it?

Programming is not our skill, so we needed a customization system that was as simple as possible but that even a visually impaired person would be able to use; Divi, Elementor, we studied many of them but did not find one that was fully suitable, then Gloria talked about full Site Editing at WordCamp Verona 2023 (this video speaks Italian only).

It’s WordPress’s native page builder, working with blocks the same way of editing contents; in short, you can modify both content and layout using the same mechanism. There it was, the method for us. All we had to do was learn how to use it, and she taught us.

We won’t go into too many technical details, but Gloria’s help allowed us to have the site structure in Italian and English without too much effort, modifying code in some particular situations only.

Multilingual site

WordPress has a huge repository of plugins to extend its functionality and among them, many are dedicated to support a multilingual site; however, we didn’t want to make our lives more difficult with complicated user interfaces or required payments to remove restrictions. We had and need to work lean, fast and proactively.

The knowledge we acquired from Gloria led us to theorize: well, if an article template has some common components, let’s translate those and then we’re ready.

Header, date and author, sidebar, footer. These are called “template parts” and are the common areas for any article or page.

Confirmation to our assumptions came from an article on the WordPress.com support, the useful web service for creating a free blog that is customizable in only a few basic functions: simple multilingual site tutorial using blocks no plugins.

Both us and Gloria were well advanced in creating the Italian pages so we decided come on, let’s do it in English!

It’s been definitely a good job and our initial plans delayed from the end of April to the end of May. Not too bad.

Only partially international

Due to our few skills in coding we didn’t consider many components could be this complex, especially search block which kept us stuck for long time. Tries and errors, stubborn experiments beyond our abilities, but the pride of doing it on our own didn’t help so we made the decision: a freelance developer would create the module for us.

Same happened with front-end’s language switcher, such as the comment submission form, or the error pages: to avoid keeping the developer’s time busy, we used the “Chat GPT” model – we don’t like to call it “artificial intelligence” because it is not smart at all.

By the way, our goal has been achieved and we have an at least decent multilingual Italian-English structure.

Translations?

Some readers asks us, “you people made life complicated when there are a lot of extensions that translate posts automatically, now with artificial intelligence is it worth the effort?”

Let’s be realistic then: which visitor from other countries browses an Italian-written blog translating it page after page?

If machine translation can be useful into an e-commerce, international visitors will go immediately away from a story-based blog as robots drastically change the text, undoing the original author’s creativity.

Not to mention how pages are translated; although automated services have improved dramatically, some details are untranslatable – especially the anagrams and puns our fictional stories are based on.

Then we might as well take the plots and adapt them to the international context. One more opportunity to correct any mistakes we carry around in the Italian stories.

Someone may consider it “resilience” given the disaster we started from, we rather call it self improvement because when you hit the ground on your ass, the only solution is to get up.