I’ve been meaning to move away from the static web site that I threw together when MyTrails took off, and onto a CMS which would allow me to make updates more easily.

My main constraints were:

• good default layouts (I’m not much of a web designer)
• easy to tweak
• multilingual support

I’d already used WordPress for other projects, and I quite like the default designs and the admin UI, so that was my first pick all along.

Then I installed qTranslate and tried to translate the main pages to French and ran into so many issues that I looked harder at Joomla and Drupal. However, multilingual support in these, while less of a hack than qTranslate, is still pretty complex, and overall they’re just more complex CMSes, so I ended up going back to WordPress and applied tweak after tweak and disabled most plugins until qTranslate was working.

It’s amazing that in 2012, mainstream CMSes still ignore multilingual requirements.

Anyway, mind the wet paint and let me know if anything’s broken.

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