English version of the site
Pffff, I has worked hard (I need to congratulate myself!). 
I prepared an English language version of Azur Dev computer news & web tutorials. 
I'm not sure azure.ironie.org is very anglophone, but as I'm locked on the ironie.org, azure is the translation of azur, and moreover the final e is like the e of English (but undoubtedly I am the only one to see it!).
The goal is to translate only the articles which can interest the rest of the world. Some news I publish are too French. I hope that this translation will attract more visitors than the French site. Answer in a few weeks... 
The difference with the French version will be the addition of a fun part, with the funny videos and the sexy pictures from my cinephile friend.
About the technique:
- All files are common, but each language has is data-base.
- The theme is translated with the gettext PHP extension which is already used in Wordpress for the administration panel and some theme translation. This is function gettext, shorten in _ (and __ or _e specifically in Wordpress).
- The other texts are editable in the administration panel.
- The data-base choice (English or French) is done in the wp-config.php file where I check the incoming domain (azure or azur.ironie.org).
In short, the 2 sub-domains go exactly at the same place, simply PHP decide the language to send according the URL address used by the visitor.
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As you can see, all is ready and works now. The biggest work is to translate all the old articles in english! 
(I'm currently doing this!)
I had 2 interrogations related to SEO:
- publish old articles on English side with their original date or the actual date? The original date replace the post in its context, but do search-engine appreciate to discover new articles with a 6 month ago date?
- the images are common, so use the French addresses? Is there a equivalent to the "duplicate content" for images, i.e. the same image with 2 different URL is punished by the search-engines?
Once again, I must be the only one asking this kind of questions. 
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I has benefitted from that to modify the articles "permalinks" in withdrawing the .html I had put at the end: azure.ironie.org/154-title.html becomes azure.ironie.org/154-title
Yes that destroys all my old links, but I of course set a conditionnal redirection in my .htaccess. I hope this won't have too much impact. 
I had enough of this useless .html.
So, here is the English version of the French site. I still have a lot of work to subscribe to the "digg-like" and translate articles. I will check in a few weeks if it was a good idea.
This article was posted by David
the Friday 15 August 2008 at 14:50
in the category PHP with tags: Blog, PHP, Programming, Server. You can leave an answer, or backlink from your own website.
