WPML is supposed to be the best multilingual plugin available, but like you I’m not completely sold on it.
In order to have a site with multiple languages you’ll need to have some setting that is global to tell what language the site is supposed to be displaying. I would use this variable. I would also stick with standard language codes like “en”, “fr”, “es”, etc. I would then name all of my fields consistently using that as either a prefix of suffix to my field name.
You could then create a function something like the following. This is just a quick idea. In reality I’d more than likely make this a filter or something more complicate because this does not account for all the details, but it would work.
function get_multilingual_field($field_name) {
global $language;
$value get_field($field_name.'_'.$language);
if (!$value) {
// no value returned for language
// get the default
$value = get_field($field_name);
}
return $value;
}
