Events manager and WPML

As a years-long user I have noticed that EM and WPML just do not mix together very well. 🙁 The Compatibility plugin does it’s best to solve most problems, but not all. A very old version worked best for me, personally, as it “broke” some settings that I did not want/need in the latest one. 😉

Anyway, after extensive trying and retrying I ended up creating a WordPress MultiSite. Each language has it’s own blog now. This way everything is separate, but can still be exchanged between blogs as well. I also use the MultiSite Language Switcher (free plugin) and the free add-on MslsMenu to link the translated items and pages together across the blogs. (Almost the same as in WPML).

Switching to MultiSite does take you a bit longer the first time as you have to manually recreate the translated pages for each new blog. But when you have got it all up and running, the whole process is much smoother. The great benefit to the MultiSite setup is though, that you have complete control over everything else.

For example: with WPML my outgoing emails got only translated half, locations were in English, Event info in Dutch, etc…
In MS that has all been “solved”. 😀

I have different domain names per blog via domain mapping, but it also works great with standard sub domain settings (en.site.com). It is better to not use sub dirs (site.com/en) in this case. 🙂

In the MultiSite environment I am also able to send out emails using different From and Name headers (“Guide Patrick” for English emails and “Gids Patrick” for the Dutch ones” for example.

Over the years I have even taken it a step further (I do love how EM let’s you hook into things!!) and created several translatable placeholders etc so everything is just perfect (for me) on every blog.

Check it out at http://www.guidepatrick.nl

Hope it helps. 😉

Addition:
When using the MultiSite setup the “CONTENTS” does not work anymore, as that will only display events from the current blog. You will need to use a shortcode like [events_list blog=”all”] to display all evens from all blogs.

If you have translated every event into every language on every blog, you can of course use CONTENTS, as all are also on the current blog. 🙂

For me, I need to use the shortcode as I have decided to not translate every event. I organize Dutch city tours and English city tours, but they are separate events all together. I did want them all to be displayed in the Events List on both the English and the Dutch blog, and the shortcode just does that.