How to have a Multilingual Classifieds

Yclas Self-hosted allows you to have more than 1 language active at the same time.

This means that you can easily change the site translation to any language you have in the site. Then simply add links in your sidebar or header using our widgets or the menu generator to link languages.

Languages Widget

The languages widget let users choose in which language your website will be translated to them. To create this widget, login to your Admin Panel -> Appearance -> Widgets and click to create the Languages Widget.

After that, a list with your selected languages will appear in your website so users can choose their prefered language. For more information about it, check out this guide.

Different languages - the same installation

This is an an example of our demo in different languages: English, Bengali, Catalan. This has some benefits and some negative things too.

Pros:

  • Easy to activate.
  • Share the same users and ads database.
  • The same domain.
  • The same theme license.

Cons:

  • Ads don’t have language attribute, this means you can not filter by language.
  • Categories and locations are not by language either, so once you write a category name it would be the same for all languages.

I don’t like this option at all. As a better alternatives and also better for SEO, we recommend the 3 other options. How to configure:

  1. Go to http://yourdomain.com/oc-panel/config/update/allow_query_language.
  2. Set Config Value to 1.
  3. Save.
  4. Now to link to a language simply : http://domain.com/?language=ca_ES.

Domain per language

This is probably the best option, imagine you have: MyDomain.com, and you want to add Spanish and Italian translations, you will buy the domains MyDomain.es and MyDomain.it and you will have the separate sites per language. It’s more expensive, but it allows you to use a local name in the domain name and for google to crawl it better.

Pros:

  • Better SEO per domain language, THIS MAKES A HUGE difference.
  • You can use the same design.
  • Users are not confused nor lost between languages.
  • If you want, you can add a localized server for the domain extension, so the domain is in the language of the country.

Cons:

  • You need a license for each domain for your premium theme.
  • You need different domain names (money expenses).
  • Separate administration of the site, software updates and moderation.
  • Probably more expenses on hosting.

This guide is only for Yclas Self-hosted