How to use a custom language switcher with Transposh to build a multi-language WordPress website

In this article you'll learn how to use a custom language switcher with Transposh to build a multi-language website with WordPress totally free.

When it comes to build a multi-language website, WordPress offers a lot of different plugins: WPML, Polyglot and so on.

All these plugins have a free version with relevant limitations: if you want a fully functional plugin you must buy the Premium version.

But this is not true for Transposh: Transposh is totally free, forever, without any limitation (in number of languages, number of websites or anything else). And it works great:

• install Transposh and activate it
• set your default language in Worpdress Settings->General section
• choose the languages you want to use in Transposh->Languages
• In Transposh->Settings set who can edit translations (tipically they will be Administrators and Editors)
• Enable url rewriting
• Set WordPress Settings->Permalink to Post name (/%postname%/)
• that's all. Your text will be automatically translated in the selected language

In addition, Transposh let you fix any translation error in a quick and easy way! So I'll show you How to use a custom language switcher with Transposh to build a multi-language website with WordPress. But... Always there is a "but" 🙂 First, to use the full widget you must upgrade to fully version: no problem, is free.  Go to Transposh section of the dashboard and choose Settings, then check the "Allow upgrading to full version from http://transposh.org, which has no limit on languages used and includes a full set of widgets" checkbox and click Save changes button. After some time you'll be notified there is an update available for Transposh: update and you are ok.

Once Transposh has been updated to the full version, you finally get the widget and... As usually, it happens that the widget probably doesn't integrate in your website design, requiring a lot of work to add custom CSS, trying to style it in a coherent way with the rest of your styles. And last but not least, English language is represented by the United States flag! Don't know why, after all english is english and it was born in UK. So, what to do? Well, we're going to build our custom language switcher.

 

What exactly we need?

Let's see how Transposh works. When you click on the flag of a non-default language, Transposh reloads the page and changes its own aspect. As you can see, a checkbox appears immediately under the flags: checking it will reloads the page in Edit mode. Depending on Transposh settings (leave them to default if you don't have any specific issue with this), every text in the page will have a small yellow button appended: clicking on that button will show a popup to edit the translation or just approve them (approved translations will have a green button instead of a yellow one) So, summarizing, first we have to provide our user an easy and possibly beautiful way to switch between languages; secondly, we have to provide to administrators and editors a quick way to put the website in edit mode to fix translations' errors. To do this will follow these steps:

• we'll set some WordPress setting
• we'll upload to our WordPress installation the flags' images we need
• we'll install a couple of plugins
• we'll write a bit of code

Custom language switcher step by step

Step 1: WordPress settings

First, as I said before, go to Settings->Permalink and set it to Post name (%postname%). Then, go o Appearance->Menus, open Screen options clicking on the top-right tab and check the CSS Classes checkbox as shown in the image below.

Step 2: the flags

First we need to get our flag icons. Just google a bit and you'll find a lot of free flag icons sets: choose your favorite one download it and upload the flags to your website using the Media section of WordPress dashboard. In thus article I'll use three flags, english, spanish (because I live in Spain) and italian (because I'm from Italy), but obviously feel free to use the flags you really need to use.

Step 3: some plugins

In order to use our flags we're going to use a couple of useful plugins (even these ones are totally free).

Plugin 1: Menu Icon by ThemeIsle

This small adorable plugin (https://wordpress.org/plugins/menu-icons/) allows you yo set any icon or image you want to associate it to a menu item. The plugin allows to choose if the menu item text must be visible or hidden, so we can add to our menu the 2 flags quickly and easily. That's all for now.

Plugin 2: If Menu

Now we have to add another menu item to switch on or off the option to edit the translation if we are not to happy with it. This function works out of the box with Transposh widget but since we're not using it we'll have to implement it manually. Technically, the If Menu plugin is not strictly necessary: I use it because I don't want visitors can change the website text as they want and I suppose that the majority of you will do the same. If Menu plugin just do this: it allows to add a conditional logic so you can show or hide single menu items depending on the user's role.

Step 4: building the menu

Okay, now we're ready to build our menu. Go to Appearance->Menus.

Settings for Menu Icon

When you are in Menus section, you'll see a new element in Add menu items left side bar: Menu Icon Settings. Open it, uncheck the pre-selected option Dashicons (we don't need it) and check the Images option like in the image to the left.

Then switch to the Current Menu tab and set Hide Label to Yes. Finally, just Save Settings!

Once we have completed these preliminary tasks, we can start to add menu items to our menu.

Adding the language switcher's menu items

We'll add 3 menu items with the flags to allow users to switch between our three supported languages. Then we'll add a fourth item to enable/disable translation editing (for this menu item we'll use the conditional logic offered by If Menu plugin. For each menu item we'll use Custom links. The image below shows you how to set the menu item for your default language (in our case it will be english). Choose Custom links as Menu item type, type the base url of your website as URL and 'en' (without quotes) as Link text.

Yes, it's true! I'm implementing multilanguage feature for this blog writing this article: thrilling, isn't it? Okay, now the menu item should look like this:

Do you see? There is a row which says Icon: Select. Click on Select to upload your flag (or to select it from you Media library if you had already uploaded it).

Now, in the input box CSS Classes (optional) type 'no_translate' (again, without quotes).

Do the same for each language you want to use. The only thing you have to change is the URL in your Custom link: add '/it' for italian, '/es' for spanish and so on...

Save you menu and take a look at your website: it is already a multi-language website!!!

Creating the "Edit mode" menu item

But automatic translations are often poor, so we need a way to change and correct them. To do this, we'll add a new Custom link to our menu: I called it Edit on/off. We won't put anything in URL field and we'll have to check the ' Enable visibility rules ' checkbox to make this item visible only to Administrators and to Editors. In addition, we have to add the class 'edit-translation' which we'll use to handle the click event and enable the edit mode (as you can see I also attach the no-translate class here since I don't need to translate this item).

Notice: this menu item will appear only when you browse the website in a secondary language: Transposh is smart enough to know that there is no translation to fix for the default language! But this item has no URL, so it won't do anything... To make it works we have to write a bit of javascript.

Step 5: a bit of coding

So we have our main menu with 3 flags (that already work fine: just give it a try) and the Edit on/off item to enable the manual editing of the translated text; this last menu item will be visible only if the user will be logged as Administrator or Editor. But in order to make this menu item work correctly we need to add some javascript. Run your editor code of choice and create a new file; then write in this code:

jQuery(document).ready(function($) {
    var urlParam = function (name) {
        var results = new RegExp('[?&]' + name + '=([^&#]*)').exec(window.location.search);
        return (results !== null) ? results[1] || 0 : false;
    }
    $(document).on('click', '.edit-translation', function(e){
        e.preventDefault();
        var currentOrigin = window.location.origin;
        var currentPath = window.location.pathname;
        var param = urlParam('tpedit');
        var newUrl = '';
        if (param === false){
            newUrl = currentOrigin + currentPath+'?tpedit=1';
            $(this).attr('href', newUrl);
        }else{
            newUrl = currentOrigin + currentPath;
            $(this).attr('href', newUrl);
        }
        window.location.href = newUrl;
    })
})

Quick explanation: when the user clicks on our menu item 'Edit on/off', first we prevent the default event, that is reload the current page. Then the code uses window.location.origin and window.location.pathname to get current base url and current path. For instance, if we are in http://codingfix.com/how-to-use-custom-flags-languages-switcher-with-transposh/ currentOrigin will be http://codingfix.com whereas currentPath will be how-to-use-custom-flags-languages-switcher-with-transposh/. But if we were in http://codingfix.com/es/how-to-use-custom-flags-languages-switcher-with-transposh/, currentPath would be es/how-to-use-custom-flags-languages-switcher-with-transposh/. Once we have the components of the current url we check if the string 'tpedit' is present in the url as a parameter. This parameter is used by Transposh to enable edit mode for translations: when you use the widget and check the Edit translation checkbox the page is reloaded with the param 'tpedit=1' appended to the url. So we have to check if we are in edit mode: if we are, we create a new url using only currentOrigin and currentPath and we redirect the browser to this url (that is we reload the page removing the param 'tpedit'); otherwise we build the new url appending the param 'tpedit=1' and reload the page in edit mode.
Now save the file with the name you prefer: I'll use the name 'myscript.js' because I've no time to waste thinking to a nicer name 🙂 Now we have to upload this file into our theme folder, preferably in a subfolder called 'js'. By the way, I strongly recommend you to use a child theme because any change you do to the theme files will be lost when the theme will be updated (if you don't know what is a child theme you can read this: https://www.wpbeginner.com/beginners-guide/wordpress-child-theme-pros-cons/ To easily create a child theme from your current theme you can use the plugin Child Theme Configurator).

Step 6: loading our script

Now we have to modify the file functions.php in order to load our script. The code to be used is slightly different depending on wheter you use a child theme or not. If you are using a child theme (recommended) you have to add to you functions.php the following code:

function load_custom_javascript() { 
    wp_enqueue_script( 'myscript', //script name
        get_stylesheet_directory_uri() . '/js/myscript.js', //complete path to the file
        array('jquery'), //array of dependencies
        '', //version number
        true //put script in footer
    ); 
}
add_action( 'wp_enqueue_scripts', 'load_custom_javascript' );

If you love to live dangerously and you're not using a child theme, just replace get_stylesheet_directory_uri() with get_template_directory_uri().

Finally we've got it!

Okay, that's all folks! Now you can start to fix automatic translations. Me too, I fear...