My multilignual blogging plugin, which I christened Multilingua, is in sort of stable state and I use it to run this blog. It's rather tailor-made, for my needs, of course. And it definitely requires some documentation and code-beautification effort. I was on my way to doing it, when I discovered Morgan Doocy and Chris Waigl are working on a WP multilingual blogging (oh yes, once again I was trying to reinvent the wheel). The name of their plugin, though different in just one letter from mine, sounds much less Latin, and it has other advantages, too. So I decided to see first if and how I can fit in their development effort.

In the meanwhile, here's a small collection of links concerning multilingual bloging with WP. Note that I haven't actually used any of the plugins mentioned, so all the info is based on the authors' descriptions.

• As I've mentioned in a previous post, Stephanie Booth has some very good ideas concerning bilingual blogin, some of which I've shamelessly imitated in MultiLingua or in my own blog. The drawback is that her solutions include some intrusive operations in WordPress code.
• BasicBilingual is an effort to collect Stehpanie's hacks into a plugin.
• Polyglot, is a plugin for people who actually publish all their posts in two (or more?!) languages. If a post doesn't exist in a certain language, though, the default-language one is used
• Planet Ozh (also quoted in WP wiki) suggests using div lang=" tags to mark different languages, and JavaScript to show and hide lanauge-dependent data. The div lang= tags are supposed to be maintained manually, by including them in the text of your posts. This is somewhat uncomfotable. Moreover, hiding posts using JavaScript has a lot of drawbacks: it's communication-expensive (since you actually load posts in alllanguages to the client); it doesn't prevent the "install language-pack" dialog (when relevant); and, it will only show you the subset of recent post in the selected language, so you might see very few posts or none at all.
• A variation was suggested by Daniel Glazeman - use stylesheet, instead of JavaScript, to hide the unwanted language.
• A noteworthy issue mentioned in the two last sources concerns outgoing links (within a post, but this could also be relevant to sidebar links). You would like your reader to the language of the page she's refered to. See again Daniel Glazeman solution.
• Everything up to here was mainly about maintaining multilingual content. There's also the related issued of localization of user interface.

In addition, if Hebrew blog is what you're after, here's the info:

• Ran Yaniv-Hartstein has created Hebrew version of WP. Since he is a professional technical writer and editor, I assume it must be better than most open-source software translations (those I know, at least).
• huji's CS student Yoram Ronen (that I don't know personally, though I'm quite sure I've graded his works last semseter) has some DYI instructions for WP-based Hebrew blog.

Note that there is a compatability issue using the lang attribute. While it's in css 2.0 standard, it isn't supported by Internet Explorer 6.0. So unless your friends & readers all take part in the alternative browser scene, you might want to read these notes.