Wimpel

Wimpel makes a WordPress site multilingual without rebuilding WordPress for it. A translation is not a special construct here. It is an ordinary post or page with its own permalink. Wimpel only remembers which posts belong together and derives everything else from that: the hreflang links for search engines, the language switcher on the front end, and the language column in your post list.

That has a practical reason. Multilingual setups that rely on their own URL rules, a front-end proxy or a separate database structure tend to produce surprises with every theme change, every caching plugin and every migration. Wimpel does not touch your permalinks and registers no rewrite rules. If you uninstall Wimpel, every translation stays in place as normal content.

Wimpel is part of the Hafenstudios fleet. It works on its own and cooperates with the other fleet plugins once they are active.

What Wimpel does

• Set up languages freely: code, display name, short label or flag, and hreflang code
• Link translations directly in the meta box on the post, with a search
• Create a translation draft with one click: Wimpel copies title, content and excerpt into a draft and links it
• hreflang links in the page source, bidirectional, with self-reference and x-default
• Language switcher as a block and as the shortcode [wimpel], with its own small stylesheet
• Language column and language filter in the post and page lists, including a “+ EN” link for missing translations
• Home page per language: if a page has no translation, the switcher leads there instead of nowhere
• You choose which content types all of this applies to

No translation proxy, no word rent

Your content does not pass through any translation service. There is no proxy between you and your site, no word quota and no recurring fee for your own content. Everything Wimpel stores are three values on the post: the language, the translation group it belongs to, and the mark as a language home page.

hreflang that behaves

The hreflang links appear only once a group has at least two published translations. Drafts and private posts stay out, and a single post produces no output at all. If another plugin on your site already handles hreflang, one checkbox in the settings switches the output off.

Privacy

No tracking, no cookie, no request to any other server, in the admin area or on the front end. Wimpel stores nothing but the three post meta values described above and its own settings.