Baan Pak Sabai Resort – Something Old, Many Things New
Site BuildsPublished August 4, 2010 at 9:52 pm No CommentsMulti-lingual functions were what I missed in the original evaluation of the old site. I still don’t know how.
However, a lengthy research of available softwares eventually settled on the WPML Multi-lingual CMS system due to the intuitiveness of the back-end’s content-admin screens, and the simplicity of the public front end. But, this then masked a nightmare for site-development when the secondary or further languages were not of the Roman alphabet, due to clashing between UTF8-general-ci and UTF8-unicode-ci encodings for database field and table saving. It would be honest to state that a full 8 weeks development time were lost, on this one topic, when trying to resolve incorrect data retention in the database.
I pushed the developers so hard for a solution that ultimately they refused to assist further, and for a time they blocked my login from posting in their support forums. Eventually I was forced to deploy with an incomplete solution after consultation with the client. On site it works, but the unicode portions of page URLs still decrypt from Thai to unintelligible unicode when copying and pasting a Thai-language page address from the site. The WPML programmers now insist this is a “won’t fix” situation … maybe they couldn’t either?
The client wanted to leverage their existing mailing list, and to grow it via the new website. One of the reasons for choosing WP-Reservation was that it auto-subscribed booking guests as a site member, unlike any of the other choices for similar functionality. Once again there was a broad selection of newsletter plug-ins, but many of them were excessively complex (and impossible to position with the client). In the end, I went with one whose name describes what it is – the ALO-Easy-Newsletter plug-in. Amongst some of the smart features in this choice, is a sidebar subscription widget for non-members of the site, which luckily fitted perfectly with the styling of the site theme. It also allows multiple mailing lists, which let us segregate the English and Thai language subscribers and newsletters too.
A bunch of other features and functions were either added through plug-ins, such as the site-wide application of Captcha anti-spam-bot measures using the Si-Captcha plug-in, and it’s sibling application Fast and Simple Contact Forms from the same authors, through to a bunch of admin tools, and numerous custom-coded functions and tweaks.
The site is nearly complete now, and currently the last few key functions are being integrated. These include facebook and Twitter social networking integration, plus expansion of the various photo functions. Mostly though, the tougher task of client training and content creation / translation is under way.
My wife, who has undertaken most of the final translation editing and correcting, is now thinking that English-Thai-English website translation is a business model she not only could undertake, but would enjoy doing. I’m not one to discourage her, and am on the lookout for suitable WordPress plug-ins for her to manage such a venture.
