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wordpressmultilingualwpml

switch footer in multi language site

I have a multilingual site and I have used WPML for this purpose. How can I use two different footers when changing the language? The footers are not designed with widgets and are separate pages.

Solution

  • WPML has it's own language code variable, ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE... so what you have to do is check that variable for the language you're looking for/want to work with.

    WordPress allows you to have multiple footers, you can start by duplicating the theme's footer.php file and appending something to the name, like footer-english.php then make the necessary changes in that file.

    Then you run a conditional check on the WPML language variable, and if it's a match (==) to a language code, then you get the footer you want using get_footer();.

    if( ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE == 'en' ):
    get_footer( 'english' ); //will get file footer-english.php
elseif( ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE == 'fr' ):
    get_footer( 'french' );  //will get file footer-french.php
endif;

    The other way to go about achieving a similar result would be to take the single footer.php file and using the ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE variable and conditional if checks and just outputting different content within the file based on the language. I'd only recommend this approach if you have pre-set number of languages and know that you won't be adding any others in the future. You could do something like this:

    if( ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE=='en' ):
    echo '<div class"site-info">English Site Name</div>';
elseif( ICL_LANGUAGE_CODE=='fr' ):
    echo '<div class"site-info">Nom de site francais</div>';
endif;

    I don't believe that'd be as efficient as just running the conditional check once and loading the appropriate footer.php file, but it's always nice to have options.