FlatPress Blog Engine Guide

FlatPress is an open source multi-lingual extensible blog engine that uses flat-files instead of a database. This blog contains instructions and tips on setting up a blog site using FlatPress. These post include how to instructions concerning installation, updating to newer releases, enabling features, adding new features, and much more.

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Saturday, March 14, 2009

How to: Add Translation Widgets to your Site

Translation widgets make web and blog sites more multilingual accessible by helping visitors read web pages in their native language. These widgets provide a link on a web page that a visitor uses to submit it to an automated web page translation site. For example Google Translator, Yahoo Babel Fish, and Microsoft translator are all sites that can be used to to translate web pages.

Listed in this post are nine free translation widgets you can add to your site. They primarily differ in languages supported, means of choosing a language, and translation sites. Each widget is active in this post so you can try each one to help in choosing a widget. Many of these widgets have different versions available at their site.

Before you can add a widget, you need to decide on at least one. Here are some items you should consider.

Identify which languages are used by your sites visitors by reviewing your site statistics.
Determine where you want the translator widget located on your site.
Decide on flag, text, or drop down links.

Installation

To display it at the top of the blog, paste the provided code in the blog subtitle field located at Admin > Option > Blog subtitle.
To display it at the bottom of the blog, paste the provided code in the blog subtitle field located at Admin > Option > Blog footer.
To add it to your side panel, follow the instructions in this post.