qTranslate and multilingual META tags
I use WordPress with qTranslate, but I needed to have multilingual META tags which qTranslate doesn’t support – so I wrote a plugin to do the job myself. It’s pretty basic, but I thought I would share in case anyone else needs something similar.
Plugin can be found on WordPress’ Plugin site here: qTranslate Meta at WP Plugin Directory.
Thanks
I’d like to thank the following people for their contributions (in chronological order):
- Victor Berchet — Help with initial localisation; French translation
- Benoit Gauthier — autosave bug fix
- Filippo Pisano — Italian translation
- Marcis G. — Belorussian translation
- Almaz — Russian translation
- Renate Kramer — German translation
- Rene — Dutch translation
I really like qTranslate and I also use it with my blog. Today I found your plugin on my WordPress Dashboard. But as you mentioned, that it doesn’t work well with All In One SEO, I don’t know why you should use it, if you have All In One SEO installed. I do have this plugin installed and as I translate all tags using the additional language inputs qTranslate adds to the tags administration, All In One SEO will automatically use the correct language for the tags and also for the title (and the canonical META tag).
But maybe there is something really new with your plugin I didn’t see.
Comment by Kau-Boy — 11 January, 2010 @ 4:04 pm
Hey,
I appreciate your interest. However I’m not sure I understand what you mean.
If I have a page which is available in multiple languages, then I want to have META keywords and META descriptions in each language. So:
http://site.com/en/my-page/will have META keywords “this, is, my page”http://site.com/it/my-page/will have META keywords “questa, e, mia, pagina”Etc.. are you saying AIOSEO can do this?
Comment by John — 11 January, 2010 @ 4:16 pm
Yes it does. Just navigate to your Posts->Post Tags menu and click on the “edit” link of one of your tags on the right side. Than you should see “Tag Name (English)” and “Tag Name (Spanish)”. By default, qTranslate adds the main language, let’s say it’s spanish in your case, to all other languages.
Once you have translated the tags, your done. As AIOSEO get’s it’s tags after they have been translated by qTranslate, you should see them in your source code. AIOSEO also adds a “description” meta tag with some lines of your post content.
For an example look at this site: http://kau-boys.de/software/kostenlose-alternative-zum-cisco-vpn-client-unter-windows-7-x64-64-bit
If you switch to the english version, you should see “operating system” instead of “betriebssystem” in the meta tag “keywords” and an english text in the “description”.
I know it is not very comfortable to translate the tags (and categories) one-by-one trough your administration. So it would be very nice, if in a new version of qTranslate, you can add new tags in multiple languages within the “Add new” section. But I usually use acronyms for my tags, so I don’t have to translate many of them.
I hope this tip was helpful for you.
Comment by Kau-Boy — 11 January, 2010 @ 4:30 pm
Hmm I see, I honestly never paid attention to that. It is a good approach and I’m sure many will find it an ideal alternative to my plugin. However there’s still a few issues which this does not handle:
Thanks again for your comments. Like I said I have no doubt that your approach may be sufficient for certain users.. but I needed a little more flexibility for my own case.
Comment by John — 11 January, 2010 @ 4:57 pm
i am using your plugin for a multilanguage site (3 languages) and even though AIOSEO can be used in multilanguage sites i find your plugin lots better simply because my customers who want multiple lingo sites cannot be expected to learn to use the langage tags. I provide the SEO capabilities (custom title and description tags per page) and they insert the key words etc.
In my opinion it is a lot more user friendly for the customers to use your plugin because they can just insert the keywords and don’t have to worry about tags etc.
Well done.
Comment by Harry — 28 January, 2010 @ 1:35 pm
I’m using qTranslate on a local testsite together with qTranslate Meta and had no problems to install and configure both plugins. These are really great plugins for multilang-sites, many thanks to Qian Qin and John for their effort!
Now I wanted to run the plugins on a livesite, installed them but when trying to activate qTranslate Meta I get the following error message:
Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.
Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_NEW in /web/1/000/032/552/99242/htdocs/wp-test/wp-content/plugins/qtranslate-meta/qtranslate-meta.php on line 36
Can someone figure out the reason for this error and give me some advice what I have to do now?
Thanks a lot
Comment by Heike — 1 March, 2010 @ 2:51 pm
Hi Heike, thanks for your comments
With regards to the error you are experiencing, please confirm that qTranslate is already activated before activating qTranslate META.
Comment by John — 1 March, 2010 @ 3:07 pm
Thanks for your reply, John. Of course I activated qTranslate first.
I also checked the usual things that may cause trouble (no SEO-Plugin installed), updated wordpress to the latest version (2.9.2) and used also the latest versions of qTranslate (2.5.6) and qTranslate Meta (0.7.1).
On the local environement everything works fine, so I have no idea what’s going wrong with the livesite – maybe the database is buggy.
I’ll give it another try tomorrow by setting up everything with a new database on the server and let you know when I had success.
Comment by Heike — 1 March, 2010 @ 7:34 pm
Heike, I doubt this is a database issue, but rather something to do with different PHP settings on your server. This should temporarily fix your problem though:
Simply comment out line 36 of
qtranslate-meta.php(It is not part of the plugin functionality anyway).If it still complains, simply replace line 36 with:
die();I will try to fix this properly in a future update. Perhaps you could send me a dump of your phpinfo by email?
John
Comment by John — 1 March, 2010 @ 9:17 pm
After some looking around, I suspect your live server is using PHP version 4.x – can you please check this and let me know?
John
Comment by John — 1 March, 2010 @ 9:39 pm
*taking my hat off to John*
PHP 4 was the culprit. After changing to PHP 5 everything runs like clockwork
Thank you very much
Comment by Heike — 2 March, 2010 @ 11:25 am
A question. Can the keywords entered in the Multilingual META window be used to generate some tags list? I am thinking of tagging WP pages (vs WP posts that already have tags widgets) in order to be able to produce lists of pages (and of posts also, why not) dealing with a particular subject described by a specific keyword.
Comment by Diana — 6 March, 2010 @ 10:41 pm
Hi Diana
No, currently the META tags cannot be used as WordPress post tags and to be honest I don’t have any plans to implement them as so.
However if someone wants to add this feature themselves I would gladly consider adding it to the plugin.
Comment by John — 7 March, 2010 @ 10:54 am
just curios: do you have any experiences with qtranslate and mailpress? mailpress.org is a great newsletter plugin, but I am having trouble with it as the newsletter language tags do not get “translated” i.e. the newsletter subject looks like this: This week at Quilombo even if I don’t send out a newsletter in multiple languages as the newsletter editor automatically creates the multiple language tabs
If you can be of help with this problem, please get back to me otherwise, sorry to have bothered you. I’d be willing to donate for a solution.
Comment by ovidiu — 9 March, 2010 @ 1:41 pm
Hey there
Yes actually I do use MailPress together with qTranslate. The way I handled this was basically creating my own MailPress theme (by copying one of the default ones) and then modifying it to my needs. Apart from aesthetics, this in particular involved using the localisation functions
__($myvar)to ensure that the qTranslate tags were correctly handled.I know this is not an ideal solution in that it does require quite a bit of work. In addition, a word of warning: keep backups of whatever MailPress themes you create, as auto-updating the plugin will erase any custom themes.
Comment by John — 9 March, 2010 @ 2:26 pm
Hi John,
Thanks for the nice plugin! I researched the whole SEO / META -matter for a whole day, comparing your plugin to “All in One SEO Pack” as well to “Platinum SEO Pack” (which is supposed to be more compatible with qtranslate than All in 1 SEO pack), but in the end I came to the conclusion that there’s actually nothing in regards of SEO and META that your plugin wouldn’t offer – in other words – it’s the best choice for someone who uses qtranslate.
The only thing I perhaps would like to see is a “noarchive” option for some pages, but that’s only a minor setback.. in fact so minor that I’m wondering why on earth do you answer the question:
“Why does it not work with AIOSEO / other SEO plugins?”
.. with:
“Yes, I know this is a major drawback.”
I see hardly any drawbacks. Or are there really some which I haven’t thought about?
Comment by Milan Kolarovic — 11 March, 2010 @ 5:43 pm
Hey Milan,
Thanks for the kind words
Well to be perfectly honest, I answered that way because I never really analysed the full extent of the AIOSEO’s abilities. In other words, I know there’s a bunch of other SEO considerations out there, but my plugin really only tackles one particular thing; so if someone is looking for some total SEO solution they might find it limiting that my plugin won’t necessarily work with other WordPress plugins…
But yes, maybe “major drawback” is an over-statement, I think I’ll actually change it
PS If you like the plugin, I would appreciate it if you would rate it in the WordPress Plugins Directory.
Thanks!
Comment by John — 11 March, 2010 @ 7:03 pm
Hi John,
Your wish has been granted, and I’ve actually rated all the plugins I’m using + reported on the compatibilities
Comment by Milan Kolarovic — 15 March, 2010 @ 4:19 am
@John:
great, maybe you can help me out? The problem I pasted above got cut out. The issue is that the subject of my newsletters doesn’t get translated. It looks like this:
How would I need to edit the mailpress template so that the subject gets properly translated without those ugly brackets?
Comment by Ovidiu — 15 March, 2010 @ 11:45 am
oh, no, my code got edited out again. can you show me an example of how your subject gets generated inside your mailpress theme? if you consider it offtopic feel free to email me.
Comment by Ovidiu — 15 March, 2010 @ 11:46 am
Generally, all you need to do is make sure that whenever your are outputting text you need to use the
__()and_e()functions.So, for example:
<?php echo $post->title ?>would become:
<?php echo __($post->title) ?>or more simply:
<?php _e($post->title) ?>If you want more help would be best to email me directly.
Comment by John — 15 March, 2010 @ 5:57 pm
Hi, this is a great plug-in thank you. I’ve been using it in a couple of websites already. Although I’ve installed and correctly manage to make it work (no much about it as it’s quite easy), I came up with a website where I can’t change titles. Don’t really know why it doesn’t work.
This is my current title code:
<title><?php if (is_home () ) { bloginfo(‘name’); } elseif (is_single() ) { single_post_title();} elseif (is_page() ) { single_post_title();} else { wp_title(‘’,true); } ?></title>Translate Meta tags doesn’t recognize this so nothing comes up on the titles. Can you please help me out with this, thank you and greetings from Sahara Desert.
Comment by João Leitão — 25 March, 2010 @ 11:03 am
Hi João,
I’m not quite sure what you mean.
That code you pasted is from your template file, correct?
Now what exactly are you trying to enter in the qTranslate META Edit Page box, and what actually is the title being set to when loading the page? (Use View Source)
John
Comment by John — 25 March, 2010 @ 11:30 am
Hey, thank you for your quick response. Yes, that is my code from the template file. What I get in the title, is the normal page name and not the text I actually entered on the meta qtranslate boxes for the 3 languages. you can check it for yourself http://www.darrita.com/ (only the location and homepage have qtranslate tags). Actually I’m noticing the code, and, both keywords and description are there but, title still missing though.
Also, could you possible know how do i add image flags to the drop down menu (i want both image + text) if possible.
thank you for the help. Cheers.
Comment by João Leitão — 25 March, 2010 @ 1:58 pm
Hi again
The reason for this is that the plugin only alters the text generated by
wp_title(), however your template is not always calling this function.One thing you could try, is adding this line to the constructor of the plugin (qtranslate-meta.php, line 29-30):
add_filter('single_post_title', array(&$this, 'hook_title'));I don’t know if it will work, but it’s worth a try… Let me know.
Comment by John — 25 March, 2010 @ 2:19 pm
HEY WOW it works perfectly now! Thank you so much, I’m just now starting that website, I can go on now. Anything you need just say so, Cheers!
Comment by João Leitão — 25 March, 2010 @ 7:55 pm
I think that you should check this http://alexking.org/blog/2008/09/06/wordpress-26x-duplicate-custom-field-issue
Comment by Yordan — 30 March, 2010 @ 4:35 pm
Hi, thanks for the plugin. I’m having trouble with my meta information being deleted. If I leave my page open, the save_post hook will trigger for revisions and I will loose my meta information.
I added this line in your hook_save_post function
$revisionID = wp_is_post_revision($post_id);if ($revisionID === false || $revisionID === $post_id ) {
... Your save code
}
This seems to cure my problem.
Comment by Benoit Gauthier — 30 March, 2010 @ 6:10 pm
Hi Benoit,
Thanks for your input. I personally have auto-save turned off because it seems to cause some other problems with qTranslate (only some of the time) and kind of annoys me in general. I have pushed your changes into a new version (0.8), would you kindly update and confirm the issue is now fixed for you?
Thanks
John
Comment by John — 30 March, 2010 @ 6:22 pm
[...] questo caso è necessario installare un ulteriore plugin, chiamato qTranslate Multilingual META, che appoggiandosi a qTranslate ci permette di tradurre anche i Meta [...]
Pingback by Come rendere WordPress multilingua | Realizzazione siti web a Palermo e Agrigento - kifulab — 2 April, 2010 @ 11:11 pm
@John:
coming back to your comment #21 I understand what you explained, but I am unsure which template file contains the part of the subject.
The only untranslated part I need to take care of is the subject of the newsletter people are getting.
I know there are loads of templates, but I guess I use the default.
I simply go to new mail in the mailpress menu, then send the mail to all recepients.
Comment by ovidiu — 7 April, 2010 @ 5:33 pm
Hmm to be honest I don’t think I’ve had that problem myself (with the email subject). I had customised a theme but can’t see that I’ve made any modifications anywhere else in the plugin…
Comment by John — 8 April, 2010 @ 8:56 am
I am not sure where to find that text. my email subjects all look like this:
This week at Quilombo
I hope it doesn’t get filtered. I have inserted extra spaces to avoid it being filtered.
Comment by Ovidiu — 8 April, 2010 @ 5:45 pm
ok, it got filtered, here it is: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=ZTXdBKBz
Comment by Ovidiu — 8 April, 2010 @ 5:46 pm
hi. i am using this plugin and i think it is awesome. only one thing – when the browser title is retrieved after it is placed the blog title. but i nmy case there is no space between them. so it looks sometimg like this:
Wine – Red, White and Rose Wines – Wholesale Bulgarian Wines有个性的红酒 | Wine with Character
how and where to add a single space between wines and the start of the chinese characters?
Comment by david — 15 May, 2010 @ 10:42 am
Hi David
This is usually very simple, in the qTranslate META settings page just insert the extra space yourself in the Title suffix box, such as:
" | my suffix"(note there is an initial space).Does this work or have I mis-understood your question?
Comment by John — 15 May, 2010 @ 11:55 am
Hi John, thank you for this awesome translation plugin!
qTransalte works great for me! But unfortunately I can not get qTranslate META run. Nothing appears in the code of my site.
Can you give me a hint what I might do wrong? This is the website I am using your plugins for: http://janfehlis.de
Thanks for any help! Jan
Comment by Jan — 17 May, 2010 @ 2:28 pm
Hi Jan
First of all I am not the author of qTranslate
Secondly, qTranslate META adds a new box to the “add/edit post” page – write a new post and scroll down underneath the text editing section, you should find the options there!
Comment by John — 17 May, 2010 @ 7:06 pm
Thank you John! Somehow I assumed you are the author.
I found the options but cannot see any changes in the source code of my homepage. I just checked on a post and there the meta appears. Maybe it does not work on the homepage?
Comment by Jan — 21 May, 2010 @ 2:21 am
Hi Jan
May I ask, go to Settings → Reading in WordPress and let me know what the Front page displays setting is set to. I suspect in your case it is set to Your latest posts, in which case qTranslate META will have no effect since the META tags are saved per post, and do not apply to these “aggregate” pages.
John
Comment by John — 21 May, 2010 @ 11:07 am
no, for me does not work. when i try to save, the initial spaec disappears. same happens when i change with initial space in wordpress blog title. any other suggestions?
Comment by david — 22 May, 2010 @ 2:44 pm
@david
Hmm interesting, this has never been an issue for me.
Try using the non-breaking space like so:
" | my suffix"Comment by John — 22 May, 2010 @ 2:49 pm
@John
Yes, you are right! : ) Thank you!
Unfortunately my template has settings for the front page and blog (news), so when i change the ‘reading’ settings my slider disappears.
Do you think there might be a way to hard code the META tags on the front page?
Comment by Jan — 22 May, 2010 @ 3:53 pm
@Jan
For this you will need to either:
wp_headand use theis_front()function to echo your META tag strings only on the front page of your siteNeither are particularly straightforward unfortunately!
Maybe a plugin exists which already gives this functionality?
Comment by John — 22 May, 2010 @ 4:00 pm
wow. that worked. thanks man. keep up the great work. !
Comment by david — 22 May, 2010 @ 6:03 pm
Just noticed all my keywords/descriptions have disappeared !?
can’t rememebr doing anything relate on this site….
weird: http://screencast.com/t/OGQ4MWNmZD
but in the custom fields they seem to be showing: http://screencast.com/t/OGQ4MWNmZD
any idea what happened?
Comment by Ovidiu — 27 May, 2010 @ 6:59 pm
one more: talking about this site: http://www.quilombobrasil.com/ I have set (I think with your help) the keywords and descripotion for the homepage like this in my functions.php: http://pastebin.com/xTia3m9n is there anything wrong with it as its not showing on the homepage?
in the hybrid options, I have checked that I do have a SEO plugin, should I uncheck it?
Comment by Ovidiu — 27 May, 2010 @ 7:30 pm
ok, I unchecked that box, and now the stuff from my functions.php gets displayed but both languages
looks like this:
<meta name="keywords" content="Ingles, africa do sul, cape town, cidade do cabo, south africa, intercambio, aulas de ingles, passeios, turismo, feijoada, restaurante brasileiro, comida brasileiroBrazilian, food, dance, music, cape town, south africa, English course, english classes, brasil, brazil, tours, tourism, exchange program, exchange
programme, brazilian food, brazilian restaurant” />
Comment by Ovidiu — 27 May, 2010 @ 7:33 pm
@ovidiu
That code you pasted will not work, because whatever you write there is not getting passed through qTranslate.
You would need to explicitly call the qTranslate functions, something like this:
if (exists_function('qtrans_getLanguage')) { $lang = qtrans_getLanguage(); switch ($lang) { case 'en': $keywords = "my,english,keywords"; break; case 'it': $keywords = "my,italian,keywords"; break; } } else { $keywords = "my,generic,keywords"; }Hope that helps.
Comment by John — 27 May, 2010 @ 9:09 pm
thanks. worked half-way, would you mind helping me out a little further?
I figured out exists_function is actually function_exists, so here is my next try, but I only tried wraping your suggestion around my keywords output, left the description as it was for now. here is the new version: http://pastebin.com/2621hZFL
unfortunately this version doesn’t output anything
for any of the two languages… no errors either in my log files.
Comment by Ovidiu — 27 May, 2010 @ 11:39 pm
no idea what I am doing wrong. here is my last try and all it does is print the right keywords out, depending on the laguage, but no into a meta tag, it simply pritns them out: http://pastebin.com/5eL3jcSc
Comment by Ovidiu — 27 May, 2010 @ 11:52 pm
@ovidiu
very simple, just change line 72 to:
return '<meta name="keywords" content="'.$keywords.'" />';Also to be safe you would want to wrap
$keywordswithaddslashes()Comment by John — 28 May, 2010 @ 12:44 pm
I will try that, but meanwhile I am wondering, why my very first try, was printing the meta keywords/description properly into the meta tags but not fitlering them by language. the code was this:
function my_meta_description( $description ) {
if ( is_home() )
$description = ”;
return $description;
}
and it was doing the job right but printing both languages – any idea about that?
I can
Comment by Ovidiu — 28 May, 2010 @ 1:39 pm
It seems you had a number of different issues on top of each other and I’m no longer sure what your problem is and what you are trying to accomplish.
Things to check are:
is_front_page()instead ofis_home()wp_headactionadd_filter( 'hybrid_meta_keywords', 'my_meta_keywords', 100);Other than that I don’t know if I can be of much more help, these things often take some playing about to get right.
Comment by John — 28 May, 2010 @ 2:15 pm
there were indeed two problems:
a) showing keywords7description on the front page, solved with your help.
b) STILL ongoing problem: the keywords/descriptions I entered on posts/pages have disappeared. it looks weird, the aggregated ones for multiple languages are still there, but not the individual ones for each language, see screen shot: http://www.screencast.com/users/ovizii/folders/Jing/media/e656a44d-603b-4f21-85fe-d32a4a221fee but in the custom fields they were showing!? who could that have happened?
Comment by Ovidiu — 29 May, 2010 @ 4:25 pm
Well unfortunately with regards to your second problem it’s difficult to tell what’s going on; I suspect it was because you had Hybrid’s SEO setting turn on which somehow messed things up. I’m not sure what you mean by the “aggregated ones”, but you can check if the fields are still there or not but running an SQL query something like this:
SELECT p.`ID`, p.`post_title`, pm.`meta_key`, pm.`meta_value`FROM wp_postmeta pm
LEFT JOIN wp_posts p ON p.`ID` = pm.`post_id`
WHERE pm.`meta_key` LIKE 'qtrans_meta:%'
See if in the
meta_valuecolumn your keywords and descriptions are still there, in qTranslate form, e.g:<!--:en-->hello<!--:--><!--:it-->ciao<!--:-->etc.
If not then you will probably need to enter them again manually… Like I said I cannot really say what’s happening, this is just a best-effort approach.
Comment by John — 29 May, 2010 @ 4:49 pm
Hallo, danke f
Comment by Choko — 12 June, 2010 @ 2:12 pm
hi john! great plugin, thank you for that!!
unfortunaltely I discovered some troubles after activating the plugin in wordpress 3. when the plugin is activated, I sometimes have troubles with viewing the admin panel, e.g. the plugin page wont display, it stays empty. on macos it happens only sometimes, other users on a windows machine can’t see most of the admin pages. I am not sure if it is the plugin or some other issue, but it started after i installed it.
versions:
wordpress 3
qtranslate Meta Version 0.8.5
qtranslate Version 2.5.8
thanx in advance for your help!
Comment by muffalin — 23 July, 2010 @ 12:44 am
Hey.. sorry to hear you’re having troubles. I’ll be honest, I haven’t really tested the plugin with that latest versions of WordPress and qTranslate. Can you see if you are getting any Javascript errors (e.g. using Firebug)?
Do you have any issues with viewing the frontend of the site?
Comment by John — 24 July, 2010 @ 11:48 am
Hi!
I have a small problem, when I enter the title of the page I want in the “Browser Title:” for my page, it results into creating a title for the page that adds the name of the blog after the title I have written. How can I make it so that the title that is created is ONLY the phrase that I enter in the “Browser Title:”.
Thanks in advance!
Comment by Maria — 26 July, 2010 @ 5:04 pm
Hi Maria,
Try checking Tools -> qTranslate META and set the title suffix to blank, or alternatively if that doesn’t work try “ ”
Comment by John — 26 July, 2010 @ 7:29 pm