After a long time of working on the code of the multilingual plugin, I finally dared to test the plugin in a live environment – my own site!

The migration wasn’t as smooth as I wished it to be, but that was expected – I fixed a bunch of issues that I hadn’t noticed until then. So far the plugin’s development is moving on very well and hopefully I’ll really be able to release it soon(I’m not coming up with a date for when that would happen, simply because things can change a lot in just a week or so).

After adding support for the excellent Google XML Sitemaps plugin(which was the main thing stopping me from trying the plugin on my site) and making the Taxonomy support better I decided to finally upload the plugin to my website and see what happens.

I activated the plugin, configured the desired languages and went through the migration of my posts(which for just two languages turned out to be extremely fast). The migration worked flawlessly and I ended up with both of my languages in the new interface(migrated from qTranslate) – for both posts and pages, and categories and tags.

I decided to use the feature of the plugin, where I can set custom slugs for each taxonomy(besides the custom slugs for each category/tag). It worked sort-of-okay, and I had to fix some bugs with it. The only concern one might have when using this feature on an already set-up site is that old links will break and you’ll have to use a plugin that redirects the broken URL’s to the correct ones. I used the 404 Redirected plugin for that – it’s a bit clumsy and is lacking Regex support, but I only have a handful of links that I need to fix anyway, so it was fine.

In the case of more URL’s, it’d probably be smarter to use a plugin like Redirection – I personally didn’t like it a lot, because it didn’t had the option of disabling automatic redirection to the home page on 404’s, but it does have support for Regex rules, which would make it much more easier to fix more of the broken links with less entries.

Other than that – the language switcher doesn’t come with built-in styling, so as you can see in my sidebar at the moment the text is not properly aligned with the flags – I don’t consider that an important issue, so I’m putting it off for a bit now – I’ll probably find some time one of these days to do that as well.

One more thing I was going to forget – statistics(of sorts) of the plugin’s performance compared to qTranslate – to be honest, most of the numbers are not that low, compared to qTranslate, but my small website wasn’t causing a lot of trouble for qTranslate anyway. I did 2 scans with qTranslate on and 2 scans with Multilingual WP on – one manual and one automatic for each.

I’m posting the results from just the automatic scans, since they seemed to have “caught” and timed more pages than my manual scans(I think the plugin doesn’t always work correctly).

With qTranslate enabled:

WordPress Plugin Profile Report
===========================================
Report date: June 6, 2013
Theme name: Moon Watch
Pages browsed: 3
Avg. load time: 1.8621 sec
Number of plugins: 19
Plugin impact: 82.56% of load time
Avg. plugin time: 1.5373 sec
Avg. core time: 0.1272 sec
Avg. theme time: 0.0281 sec
Avg. mem usage: 137.17 MB
Avg. ticks: 158,059
Avg. db queries : 52.67
Margin of error : 0.1695 sec

Plugin list:
===========================================
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) – 0.0017 sec – 0.11%
qTranslate Separate Comments – 0.0451 sec – 2.93%
qTranslate – 0.8806 sec – 57.28%
Other(13 plugins) – 0.6097 sec – 39.68%

With Multilingual WP enabled:

WordPress Plugin Profile Report
===========================================
Report date: June 6, 2013
Theme name: Moon Watch
Pages browsed: 5
Avg. load time: 0.7518 sec
Number of plugins: 18
Plugin impact: 79.91% of load time
Avg. plugin time: 0.6008 sec
Avg. core time: 0.1270 sec
Avg. theme time: 0.0129 sec
Avg. mem usage: 58.95 MB
Avg. ticks: 14,781
Avg. db queries : 82.60
Margin of error : 0.0111 sec

Plugin list:
===========================================
P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) – 0.0023 sec – 0.38%
Multilingual Wp – 0.1557 sec – 25.92%
Other(16 plugins) – 0.4426 sec – 73.7%

I used the P3 (Plugin Performance Profiler) plugin – I really think it’s an awesome tool – I’m not sure how accurate it its, but it does seem pretty good

Well, that’s all for now – feel free to try the beta version of the plugin, by downloading it from GitHub, and wish me luck with releasing the plugin publicly soon!