During the past three weeks, we've been interviewing with personnalities from the French Social advertising and Webcomics scene. This Monday, we meet with Amir Helzer, the author of WPML, a very powerfull plugin for the Wordpress and WordpressMU platforms, which enable users to build fully localized / international websites, and brings together the simplicity of Wordpress with the powerfullness of other CMSs like Drupal or EZpublish. We are particularly interested in platforms like Wordpress or Dotclear, because a lot of webcomics use them. Amir is the founder of OnTheGoSystems, which is the owner of ICanLocalize and WPML. He's been in business since 2007.

Oghme Comics : Hi Amir, you're the man behind the WPML project, a plugin for Wordpress and WordpressMU (or should I say a suite?), which gives users, for the first time, means of using Wordpress as a true mutlilingual content management system. But just before we dig into this, can you tell us about your background ?

Amir Helzer :  I'm fairly new to web programming. Have been working as a VLSI designer for 10 years and then changed course and started my own business. Now, I'm running a do-it-yourself translation business. We found out that people (rightfully) prefer using content management systems for building websites so we created WPML. Besides its multilingual features, WPML also makes it easy for people to order translation work from us and this is where we get most of our work today.

Oghme Comics : Where did WPML emerge from ? Did you design it from scratch, or did you build on other examples ? What made you take up that challenge ?

Amir Helzer :   WPML was actually born from Drupal, an established and excellent content management system. We used Drupal for several projects and also created a translation module for it. We were familiar with several multilingual plugins for WordPress but nothing measured up to what Drupal offered, so instead of waiting for it to rain, we decided to bring the clouds and built our own multilingual plugin from scratch, based on Drupal's architecture. Our feeling was that it's going to be easier to build it correctly from scratch than take something that started the wrong way and try to patch it. I think that this decision proved right. But, we're not there yet. We're working on additional functions for WPML which will allow running multilingual business websites with WordPress. There are more news to come...

Oghme Comics : Now that you tell us, WPML's structure sure has a Drupal feel. Could you nail down for us the most important features a multilingual CMS must have, in your opinion ? What other Wordpress plugins lacked that you provide, or intend to provide in the next updates ?

Amir Helzer :   A good plugin (or solution for anything) is not really a collection of killer features. More important is the basic problem that it needs to solve. In WordPress the issue is that the system is not language-aware. There's content but that content is not associated with languages. We decided to approach it by assigning languages to 'things', such as posts, pages, tag, categories and now also comments. This solution allows it to work with other custom data types as well. In WPML, each 'thing' has one language and translations are linked together using a translations table. Other WordPress plugins, like xLanguage and qTranslate take a different approach. They combine all the contents in all languages in a single page. Then, when displaying, they filter just the required language. I can't say that the other solution is not valid. It has it's advantages and disadvantages. I think that for running a simple blog, both would do fine. For running a complete site, WPML's approach seems better, as it can handle everything and not just the title and body as qTranslate does.

Oghme Comics :  One of the most interesting features in our opinion, is that WPML can hook with quite anything : themes, plugins, WP itself. What does it take to localise a plugin or a theme ? Can you detail the process ?

Amir Helzer :   There's actually an excellent page in WordPress.org for that: http://codex.wordpress.org/I18n_for_WordPress_Developers . We have also written a shorter post about it a while ago: People often confuse between making a plugin or theme translatable and multilingual-ready. If it's translatable, it means it can run in a different language. Multilingual means it can run in several languages. The difference can be quite significant. WPML helps create multilingual themes and plugins by making its string translation mechanism available to them. In short, what this means is that other plugins (or the theme) can input texts from the user and WPML will let users enter translation for them. We "borrowed" that feature from Drupal too.

Oghme Comics : Which users are you targeting for WPML ? Who can benefit from it and on what level ?

Amir Helzer :   Entering multilingual content is clearly not for everyone. 99% of WordPress users don't need it, but the remaining 1% still make up a large number of people. We're trying to address anyone who needs to run a multilingual website, not just blogs. Since we're making our living from people who also use our translation service, we try to make it appealing for business users. For this reason, WPML includes the CMS navigation functions, so that it helps build full websites.

Oghme Comics : Prospects : Apart for big companies websites, the web still has a long way to go before it's fully - truly internationalized ? You can't ask people worldwide to all master the same language. What do you think the standard internationalization pipeline for could look like for middle/small sized websites, in the near future ?

Amir Helzer :   I truly think that WordPress has the potential of becoming a de-facto standard for a wide range of websites. You can build a very small and basic site with it in one day and it will also serve you for building a corporate site. WPMU takes it one level up and helps build blog networks using the same platform. If it's good enough to power wordpress.com, it's probably just fine for any website on any scale. For WPML, our main concern is how to keep making it more complete but still simple. We don't want to get to the stage where Drupal is now, where it's so powerful that even its core contributors have a hard time using it ;-)

Oghme Comics : Can you tell us more about ICanlocalize.com ? How does it related to WMPL ? Who is your average user ?

Amir Helzer :   ICanLocalize.com is our translation service. It's an optional service which is tightly integrated into WPML that allows people to order translation work from us. WPML can open accounts in ICanLocalize and then send documents to translation. All this communication is done behind the scenes. Users just select what they need to have translated and pay for it. The contents are sent to our server, get translated and stored back in WordPress. Almost all of our clients are actually web-designers who build websites with WordPress. Their clients requested a multilingual site and they discovered they can do it using WPML. The most common response we get from new customers is that they had to discover our translation service by chance and that we're not promoting it well enough. We're working hard to change that!

NB1 : Here is a link to a very thourough tutorial (in French) to the process of building a multilingual WPML site.
NB2 : The Oghme Comics portal uses the French Dotclear platform, and the translation plugin DCTranslation developed by  Jean Christophe Dubacq. On the other hand, our new portal BabelComics, which is a collective of 6 webcomics authors (in both French and English languages) is built upon WorpressMU, with WPML, so as to ease the interfacing with our collaborators. Wordpress has de facto become the standard platform for webcomics publishing with themes like Comicpress and Webcomic+Inkblot.