Maintenance suspended on Language Switcher WordPress plugin

As you may have noticed if you have visited the Language Switcher plugin page in the last couple of days, I'm sorry to announce that after much thought, I've decided to stop maintaining the Language Switcher plugin for WordPress.

A bit of history... I decided in 2006, after returning from an extended trip in Central America, to start a bilingual blog, HodgBlog. After investigating software options, I downloaded WordPress and the Polyglot plugin, and I was able to get my blog up and running, after fixing up the plugin somewhat. Soon I wrote an article on poplarware.com with instructions on how to set up a bilingual blog. Then, over the course of the next year, after having to make more and more revisions to Polyglot to get everything working, I eventually decided to rewrite it extensively and adopt it as the Language Switcher plugin -- with full credit to the original author of course (the magic of the GNU Public License). As of the beginning of 2010, I had made multiple new versions of Language Switcher, my article on how to set it up had expanded into a five-page mini-site, and I had also successfully introduced many changes into the WordPress core software that allowed the Language Switcher to function better. But at its core, WordPress has never really been architected to support multiple languages, and Language Switcher was always kind of a hack.

In the meantime, I'd also gotten to be an expert in Drupal development, and Poplar ProductivityWare's business the last few years has been almost exclusively Drupal-related. As you can tell from reading my Drupal vs. WordPress article, I think both Drupal and WordPress have their merits, and I believe in using the tool that is best for each job. And Drupal is definitely more suited for a multi-lingual site -- it requires no "hacking" to get the job done, since its core architecture supports multiple languages.

So, in conjunction with my recent move of poplarware.com to Drupal, I decided to incorporate HodgBlog into my main Drupal site. It took me a couple of hours... I had to write a custom module to import the content, because each WordPress bilingual post had to be made into two separate Drupal posts, one for each language, marking each as translations of each other. I also had to break up the bilingual WordPress tags into an English language Drupal taxonomy vocabulary, with Spanish translations. And then I had to do a bit of translation inside Drupal, and create some Views in Drupal for the main HodgBlog page and tag pages. But it was all pretty straightforward, because all the tools exist in Drupal for creating this type of site.

And that's where things stand today. I'm no longer using the Language Switcher plugin myself, and Poplar ProductivityWare is not doing much WordPress work these days, so I don't have much incentive to keep the Language Switcher plugin going. Its current version does work fine for WordPress 2.9.x, and it's likely it will continue working well for a few new versions of WordPress. I'd certainly be willing to upgrade it in the future, if someone decided to sponsor the work, and I'd also be happy if someone decided to take over maintenance. I'll keep you posted...