WP is php, and it tends to take a ton of plugins of various quality, vendors and support to get it to where you want it. Last I looked at it, it didn’t even support multi-language out of the box.
That’s a feature not a bug. >90% of the websites don’t care about multi-language. Why should their CMS be more complex just to carter the rest? Plugins nicely separate the concern and let the authors of the plugins get paid for their efforts.
Typical American viewpoint that is. In European markets it is probably the inverse, most sites need multi language support. For a contentmanagement system I find it pretty poor to be missing this.
Indeed, I thought for a moment about Switzerland, that might have one of the highest rate of multilingual websites at least in Europe.
I wasn’t able to find what fraction of the Internet sites are multilingual but would be curious what’s your estimate. I still would be surprised if it is >10%. Maybe more if you weight by traffic but that is not the relevant metric here.
The plug-in approach has another advantage: there are several reasonable approaches to a multilingual site, i.e. you can have a default language if a translation is not available. Or rather show nothing. You may want to force a translation of each page. How do you track the translation of changes in one language, etc.
By picking/adjusting a plug-in you get the behavior you want instead of a one approach satisfies nobody default solution.
* first of all I think that not translating web content is leaving big chunks of potential markets by the wayside. the whole point of the web is that people are able to find you and your offerings worldwide - maybe they could be a fit in places you didn’t expect? [1]
* I’ve dealt with these WP multilingual plugins and they were all atrocious (see my first comment). Nowadays, if I have a core set of requirements, and a piece of software only offers that set through plugins, I will not consider it anymore. Plugins are fine for nice-to-haves, but not for must-haves. It’s a recipy for a maintainability disaster.
"Various quality" is a very mild expression for it already.
Add to that the tendencies of many to use PHP directly as a way of cutting pages into non-modular non-composable pieces, that can only be concattenated instead of used everywhere, and add to that a mix of PHP, HTML, CSS and JS in the same file ... well you are set up for a catastrophe in terms of maintainability, which maps closely to how most plugins for WP are written.
