Can we do this in Wordpress? or another solution?

[littlened]

Hi,

I’ve been approached by a client about the possibility of using WordPress for a project we’re about to start. I’m not an expert with WordPress and wondered if what we want to do is possible.

To start off with, the site needs to be Multilingual, there are various plugins to handle this, so I don’t particularly think this is going to be too much of a problem.

We need to build some custom modules to handle products, recipes and recipe categories with the ability to links recipes to products and categories etc, along with a search feature to search and display recipes by certain criteria. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue. What I don’t know is how we’d handle the multilingual side of things for the custom modules? Will the multilingual plugin do this for us? or will we need to build the modules to specifically be multilingual?

We also need the ability to assign different page templates to pages, I’m assuming this is a fairly basic feature in WordPress.

Are we able to do this using Wordpress? is there a better solution?

[AussieJohn]

@littlened

To start off with, the site needs to be Multilingual, there are various plugins to handle this, so I don’t particularly think this is going to be too much of a problem.

We need to build some custom modules to handle products, recipes and recipe categories with the ability to links recipes to products and categories etc, along with a search feature to search and display recipes by certain criteria. This shouldn’t be too much of an issue. What I don’t know is how we’d handle the multilingual side of things for the custom modules? Will the multilingual plugin do this for us? or will we need to build the modules to specifically be multilingual?

I have used the WP plugins Types and Views a few times in the past year for custom post types. It does a great job of making it easy to create, manage and display custom content types (products, recipes, whatevers). The same guys that built these plugins are also the authors of the very popular [URL=“http://wpml.org/”]Wordpress Multilingual (WPML) plugin - and as you’d expect they try to make sure [URL=“http://wp-types.com/documentation/multilingual-sites-with-types-and-views/”]that everything plays nice together
There are also many plugins that are compatible with the WPML plugin.

@littlened

We also need the ability to assign different page templates to pages, I’m assuming this is a fairly basic feature in WordPress.

Separate templates is something that Wordpress handles natively. The only thing you need to do is add a file in the theme directory that starts with a specially constructed comment, for example:

/**
 * Template Name: Product Home Page
 * Description: A full-width product listing
 */

@littlened

Are we able to do this using Wordpress? is there a better solution?

It’s certainly possible to build it in Wordpress, whether it is the best choice depends on a few other factors as well. You might find that there are other CMSes out there that will offer you better/more features/scalability/ease of development etc. Of course these choices will also be influenced by the clients budget and requirements moving forward.

If your post (roughly) describes the scope of the project, then I’d say Wordrpess would certainly be a viable option

[littlened]

@AussieJohn

I have used the WP plugins Types and Views a few times in the past year for custom post types. It does a great job of making it easy to create, manage and display custom content types (products, recipes, whatevers). The same guys that built these plugins are also the authors of the very popular [URL=“http://wpml.org/”]Wordpress Multilingual (WPML) plugin - and as you’d expect they try to make sure [URL=“http://wp-types.com/documentation/multilingual-sites-with-types-and-views/”]that everything plays nice together
There are also many plugins that are compatible with the WPML plugin.

Separate templates is something that Wordpress handles natively. The only thing you need to do is add a file in the theme directory that starts with a specially constructed comment, for example:

/**
 * Template Name: Product Home Page
 * Description: A full-width product listing
 */

It’s certainly possible to build it in Wordpress, whether it is the best choice depends on a few other factors as well. You might find that there are other CMSes out there that will offer you better/more features/scalability/ease of development etc. Of course these choices will also be influenced by the clients budget and requirements moving forward.

If your post (roughly) describes the scope of the project, then I’d say Wordrpess would certainly be a viable option

Thanks for the reply.

When we build the custom plugins, do we need to build them to be multilingual, or will the language plugin handle all of that?

[AussieJohn]

@littlened

Thanks for the reply.

When we build the custom plugins, do we need to build them to be multilingual, or will the language plugin handle all of that?

If you use the Wordpress API for localization in your plugins then you should be able to make them multilingual using the WPML plugin.

WPML notes this on their front page:[INDENT]“Every theme or plugin that uses WordPress API runs multilingual with WPML.”[/INDENT]

There are a few tutorials[1] and [URL=“http://codex.wordpress.org/Translating_WordPress”]articles[2] [URL=“http://www.appthemes.com/blog/how-to-translate-a-wordpress-theme/”]around[3] on localization that are probably worth reading as well.

[1] http://wp.tutsplus.com/tutorials/how-to-localize-wordpress-themes-and-plugins/
[2] http://codex.wordpress.org/Translating_WordPress
[3] http://www.appthemes.com/blog/how-to-translate-a-wordpress-theme/

[system]

I think the better solution for you is Joomla 2.5. Joomla 2.5 has introduced multilingual features natively. You will need to activate the language switcher module and your website visitors will need to switch the joomla core labels and headings to their preferred language. Moreover You can set Joomla to detect the country from the browser settings and open with the correct language. You can assign different page templates to pages in Joomla 2.5.