Starting WordPress Community Wales

Launching WordPress Community Wales!

WordPress Cymru FacebookRecently, Wales has experienced a substantial tech-revolution – but of course there is quite a way to go yet before Wales is viewed as a fantastic location for digital businesses. Despite this, there are many communities and technology groups that have started and developed (e.g. Haciaith, Hedyn etc), which are celebrating the Welsh digitial businesses, and promoting communication and awareness amongst Welsh bloggers.

Welsh Blogs

On Hedyn’s list of Welsh blogs – most of them use WordPress as their system of choice for controlling content – probably because of the ease os use and the speed at which you can quickly start a WordPress site. Most of these have gone down the option of using the WordPress service which comes with hosting (on WordPress.com), rather than using their own hosting (on WordPress.org). As well as this, there are many agencies and website design & development business (such as Gwe Cambrian Web!) who specialize in the use of WordPress for their clients.

This means that this is a huge wealth of users, designers and developors for WordPress in Wales – but no way for them to communicate and share news about the software. So – let’s create one! As part of Thema – here is a WordPress Community on Facebook – join us now and help us put Wales on the WordPress map!

http://facebook.com/WordPressCymru

Putting multilingual at the core…

Thema is being developed to allow individuals to create multilingual websites of their own, with the hope to simplify publishing digital content in Welsh. The software can, by getting translated, offer multilingul solutions aside from the usual bilingual Welsh/English – and create websites that offer Welsh/Basque, Welsh/Catalan, and so forth.

By now, I’ve put the fundamental elements of the bilingualism into the theme. It works in a very simple way – by ensuring that the plugin Polylang by Chouby is loaded – which does everything technical that enables bilingualism/multilingualism. Thema will insist Polylang is installed once it is loaded into WordPress.

In Polylang, pages and posts are “marked” in the meta data with a language, and the users designate the other pages that correspond to these in the other languages. I hope that Thema will add an extra layer of usability, based on Polylang which will mean it will be that much easier to create and control a multilingual website.

Here are some of the aspects of usability that are in my plan:

  • See how many pages/posts haven’t been allocated a language
  • See how many pages/posts without a counterpart in another language
  • Add a new language easily

Do you have any specific usability aspects you would like to see? Let me know in the comments 🙂

Thema: Multilingual Theme Project for Wales

Well – here’s the start to another incredibly exciting project!

Recently, I’ve been very lucky to win a grant from the Welsh Government to develop a framework theme for WordPress, which will allow users to publish websites and content bilingually (and multilingually) really easily, and a theme which is accessible to all.

I’ll be designing and publishing three themes to start, for:

  • Business/Charities
  • Personal blogs
  • E-Commerce website

I hope to have the time to blog about the developments, otherwise, Thema will soon be here!

The Purpose

The purpose of the project from my view point is to enable anyone to publish content and websites multilingually, while making sure that they are accessible (can be used by anyone with any sort of disability). It’s a great chance therefore for business, charities, e-commerce websites, individuals and bloggers to have a modern website design, which gives them the ability to publish and annouce content bilingually/multilingually originally from their website.

I currently run a business which designs and develops websites, called Gwe Cambrian Web Cyf. Our business aim is to “Get Wales Online” – I am incredibly enthusiastic about being able to increase how much Welsh content there is online – especially the content we can find by using online search engines like Google.

As far as the Welsh Government are concerned, their aims for the project is to get more Welsh content online, an aim we are enthustic about also.

Open Source

I have decided to open this to the community as an open-source project. This means, of course that it will be free for anyone to use as soon as we have achieved the proposal for the grant but I am also hoping to create a community of Welsh WordPress developers who are enthusiastic about using this technology in Wales, to promote Wales and getting Welsh online.