I am planning on doing something with Wordpress that people might see as a bit of an hack, but at least I know it’s going to work. Like some of you know, I am working on a new layout for the Headphones required / Mets tes écouteurs podcast’s website. I was thinking about doing something that would rely on Prototype / Script.aculo.us, but I changed my mine after listening to this episode of the Canadian Podcast Buffet.

“You have to make a website so that everyone can see it, not just the ones that have the browser you like… or the one that works.” (Nico)

So I’ve decided to keep the layout I was aiming at, but to get rid of the intense javascript, and make it simplier for anyone to find my podcast feeds in both format, AAC or MP3. When you ask only for the most basic things, this could be what you get…

Click here to see what it will look like

My actual layout is based on Kubrick, Wordpress default theme. I wrote almost everything in both french and english, but I’ve decided to divide languages into different themes that will be pointed by two different domain names : headphonesrequired.com for english, and metstesecouteurs.com for french. I came out with a way for both websites to share the same database, by changing the option_value data of the parameters home and siteurl of the wp_options table from “http://headphonesrequired.com/blog” to “/blog”, making relative links for the whole website (in doing so, I would need to figure out how to solve RSS issues, but I guess I could hack the feed as well).

Afterwards, you duplicate the Wordpress core into another directory, you change it’s theme to suit the appropriate language and that’s it! I know there are plugins that could have avoid me all this trouble, but knowing that you will get french no matter what using one URL and english on the other one is very important to me. Isn’t that the point of translating the name of your project and having bought two domain names?