This website goes BACK in time, hell if it does. It started maybe in 2001, with static HTML. Then I played for a while with SHTML, before jumping head on to PHP and writing my own, ugly CMS.

I already had italian and english articles translated in here, and when I switched to wordpress (oh, joy and pain) I found this nifty plugin called qTranslate that kind of automated the translation management.

Looked like a good idea back then, so I installed it and moved all bilingual articles in it.

Yeah, looked like a good idea back then.

After a while though, as WordPress updates progressed, I noticed how I couldn’t write new posts anymore because the custom editor changes broke… either that, or I had to manually add the language tags, or I had to keep back the version of WordPress not to lose editor function. NO BUENO!

Until qTranslate stopped working altogether, and sorry guys, it’s not mantained anymore, f*ck you!

Luckily qTranslate-X was released, giving some more oxygen to my rare yet constant contribution to this blog.

Then, guess what, even qTranslate-X was discontinued.

Luckily qTranslate-XT came out, and it’s on GitHub, so as far as I see it’s actively followed, developed, improved… stil it doesn’t cut it for me.

I mean, developers are doing a GREAT job… can you imagine what a huge hassle is following development of a tool so complex, and coordinating the efforts of several people, while trying to keep the code working after major WordPress updates are released?

There must be a ot of people who thank anything that is sacred for qTranslate-XT’s existence.

I’m not one of those, since especially lately, I’m either releasing articles in italian, or in english, so there is not a lot of translations going on.

Everytime I searched for methods to remove qTranslate, every strategy involved choosing a language to keep, and just thrasing the others! As if I didn’t invest a LOT of time translating! Why should I waste al this work?

I used to think the work to do that by myself was going to be immense so I never tried, until today, when I achieved the objective, and am now happily composing, on Gutenberg editor, with a qTranslate-less version of my blog, where every article has been kept, and the URL redirection of “ephestione.it/it/title” has been fixed and redirected to “ephestione.it/it-title”.

What’s the strategy? Well, I built the code for my own website (and I am NOT willing to customize it for yours, unless you offer to pay me), so these are the premises:

1. Not every article is bilingual, on the contrary most are either in english or italian
2. I obviously want to mantain both languages
3. I don’t care if the blogroll will show both italian and english articles (some the translation of the other) in the same sequence
4. I want to keep the existing database entry, and add another database entry for the additional language (if present), in this second case english is kept to its original database row, and italian is inserted as a new row
5. It is made to work with bilingual sites, but in reality it will most definitely work fine with multilingual sites and you may even not need to edit anything; still, you are expected to have familiarity with PHP to run it with confidence (BACKUP DATABASE FIRST!!!!11!!!1oneone)

Following is the code.

<?php

ini_set('display_errors', 1);
ini_set('display_startup_errors', 1);
error_reporting(E_ALL);

$dbhost="localhost";
$dbname="dbname";
$dbuser="dbuser";
$dbpass="dbpass";

function doquery($query) {
	$result=mysqli_query($GLOBALS["dbcon"],$query);
	if ($report=mysqli_error($GLOBALS["dbcon"])) {
		die($report);
	}
	return $result;
}

function excerpt($string) {
	return substr($string, 0, 30)."...";
}

$erroremysql=false;

$GLOBALS["dbcon"]=@mysqli_connect($dbhost, $dbuser, $dbpass);
if (mysqli_error($GLOBALS["dbcon"])) $erroremysql=true;
@mysqli_select_db($GLOBALS["dbcon"],$dbname);
if (mysqli_error($GLOBALS["dbcon"])) $erroremysql=true;
@mysqli_set_charset($GLOBALS["dbcon"],'utf8');
if (mysqli_error($GLOBALS["dbcon"])) $erroremysql=true;

$posts=doquery("SELECT * FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type='post'");

$a=array("<!--:","-->");
$b=array("\[:","\]");
$lang=array("it","en");
$main="en";

echo '<font face="Courier New">';

while ($post=mysqli_fetch_assoc($posts)) {
	echo "<strong>post {$post["ID"]}</strong>:<br/>";
	if (strpos($post["post_title"],"[:en]")!==false || strpos($post["post_title"],"[:it]")!==false) {
		$s=$b;
	}
	else if (strpos($post["post_title"],"<!--:en-->")!==false || strpos($post["post_title"],"<!--:it-->")!==false) {
		$s=$a;
	}
	$data=array();
	foreach ($lang as $l) {
		if (preg_match('/'.$s[0].$l.$s[1].'([\s\S]+?)'.$s[0].$s[1].'/',$post["post_title"],$matches)) {
			$data[$l][0]=$matches[1];
			preg_match('/'.$s[0].$l.$s[1].'([\s\S]+?)'.$s[0].$s[1].'/',$post["post_content"],$matches);
			$data[$l][1]=$matches[1];
		}
	}
	if (count($data)>1) {
		foreach ($data as $k=>$v) {
			echo "$k: ".excerpt($v[0])." - ".excerpt(strip_tags($v[1])).(($k==$main)?" main":"")."<br/>";
			//it is the main language, just updates post stripping the other language
			if ($k==$main) {
				doquery("UPDATE wp_posts SET post_title='".mysqli_real_escape_string($dbcon,$v[0])."', post_content='".mysqli_real_escape_string($dbcon,$v[1])."' WHERE ID=".$post["ID"]);
				echo "\n";
			}
			//it is not, so creates a new post copying over the rest of the data
			else {
				doquery("
					INSERT INTO wp_posts (
						post_author,
						post_date,
						post_date_gmt,
						post_title,
						post_content,
						post_modified,
						post_modified_gmt,
						post_name)
					VALUES (
						{$post["post_author"]},
						'{$post["post_date"]}',
						'{$post["post_date_gmt"]}',
						'".mysqli_real_escape_string($dbcon,$v[0])."',
						'".mysqli_real_escape_string($dbcon,$v[1])."',
						'{$post["post_modified"]}',
						'{$post["post_modified_gmt"]}',
						'".$k."-{$post["post_name"]}')
				");
				echo "\n";
			}
		}
	}
	else  {
		echo "1: ".excerpt($data[key($data)][0])." - ".excerpt(strip_tags($data[key($data)][1]))." main"."<br/>";
		doquery("UPDATE wp_posts SET post_title='".mysqli_real_escape_string($dbcon,$data[key($data)][0])."', post_content='".mysqli_real_escape_string($dbcon,$data[key($data)][1])."' WHERE ID=".$post["ID"]);
		echo "\n";
	}
}

This is what you need to add to .htaccess in the root of your public_html folder, obviously adapting it to your needs, and adding more, similar rows if you have additional languages:

RewriteRule ^it/([a-z0-9\-\_]+)/$ /it-$1/ [R=301,L]

In my case, it worked like a charm, even if not without some cold sweats.