Converting multilingual multisite to multilingual single-site

  • Situation:

    I initially set up my multilingual websites as multisites, but this approach has proven to be unmanageable due to the significant functional differences between the two language versions. Therefore, I want to switch to a single-site architecture and add the translated content directly.Questions:

    1. What is the recommended way to convert a multilingual multisite to a multilingual single-site using Polylang?Currently, the root site (root.de) is empty, and the language versions are installed on subsites using a folder structure:
      • English site on: root.de/en
      • German site on: root.de/de
    2. How should I manage the content transfer, assuming German is the primary language?
      • Should I move the German site content into the root and then use Polylang to add the /DE and /EN URL extensions to avoid redirects?
      • Alternatively, should I develop the project from the German subsite and instruct Polylang to replace the /DE URL extension with /EN for the translated content?
    3. Do I still need Loco Translate, or can Polylang handle the translation of this kind of content as well?

    The page I need help with: [log in to see the link]

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  • I initially set up my multilingual websites as multisites

    oh no! Multisite was never designed for this purpose.

    What is the recommended way to convert a multilingual multisite to a multilingual single-site using Polylang?

    there isn’t really one, you’re going to need to rebuild from scratch am afraid.

    My suggestion:

    1. use 1 language per post (such as Polylang) its the easiest to manage and integrate into the WP architecture. It may be an issue if you’re trying to setup a WooCommerce site with 10s or 100s of thousand products…but then WooCommerce ins’t the way to go either.
    2. Export all your different language posts form your different websites using the Export post tool.
    3. setup your website with different languages.
    4. Import your default language posts into your new website. If you have 2 languges (de and en) and de is the default one setup up as so in Polylang, all your de posts being imported will automatically be assigned the de language.
    5. For the remaining languages, this is where it becomes a little more tricky.
    – Polylang uses a custom non-hierarchical taxonomy (like tags) to track each language.
    – Use a post import plugin such as Import WP which allows you to specify additional meta-data for each posts using CSV files. You can create an an excel file with the list of your posts and add an extra column for the language locale required by the Polylang taxonomy. When imported into your website, these new posts will be associated with the correct language.
    – The most difficult part if to pair each translated content. Polylang uses meta-fields to link translated posts to each other using the post ID, so you will need to get a list of the posts IDs of the default language imported in step 4, and at these IDs as an additional column and identify them with their corresponding post in that language.

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