mike40033

Thanks for your help so far. I found this error in /var/log/apache2/error_log:

[Mon Mar 20 20:57:22.737750 2017] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 25619] [client 116.212.202.58:38500] AH01067: Failed to read FastCGI header
[Mon Mar 20 20:57:22.737788 2017] [proxy_fcgi:error] [pid 25619] (104)Connection reset by peer: [client 116.212.202.58:38500] AH01075: Error dispatching request to :

I couldn’t find any new log files created in the wordpress directory, even though I set WP_DEBUG and WP_DEBUG_LOG to true in wp-config.php

I googled the error message, but there were no log files at the locations suggested by https://serverpilot.io/community/articles/error-failed-to-read-fastcgi-header.html

Note that this error is happening when I try to install wordpress, so there are no plugins or themes to disable – wordpress is not yet installed!

Many apologies, Postie was not to blame (I think), but WordPress’ own ’email to post’ feature.

Thanks!

I suspect that most non-English speakers visiting a translated website would want links to stay on pages in their own language…. therefore most webmasters would want this too. But it could be an option in the admin pane..

You may consider this a humble feature request from a very excited new user 🙂

Yay! Your tip about permalink structure did the trick!

I indeed have no posts, since I’ve done everything as pages, and my permalink structure was set to /%postname%/

‘Recently Popular’ is still doing bizarre things, and big-animals.com/language/fr/english-slug still gives 404 errors, but big-animals.com/language/fr/limace-anglais is fine. Never mind, there are plenty of ‘popular’ plugins out there.

Now the only issue left is the absolute URLs in the page body. Perhaps the best solution for me, if your software can’t do it automatically, is to use the ‘virtual hosts’ feature and change all the links from “http://www.big-animals.com/english-url/” to “/english-url/”

How does it work for other people? Or do most of your users just write blogs with no internal links?

Look forward to seeing the guide!

Ok, here’s my list of plugins…

Akismet
Google Maps (responsible for translating [map:http://bla] into a map – the word ‘map’ gets translated
GTS Translation (hopefully this one is compatible with itself!)
Hello Dolly (not activated)
Joomla/Mambo to WP Migrator (not activated – I used this to move my site from Joomla to WordPress, then deactivated it)
Meta SEO Pack – I tried disabling this, but it had no immediate effect
Recently Popular – this produces the ‘popular’ list at the bottom of the sidebar – I also tried disabling this, but it didn’t immediately help.
WP Google Analytics
XML Sitemap Feed
Youtuber

Bizarrely, in the list of ‘most popular’, some URLs are translated and others aren’t – eg, http://www.big-animals.com/language/fr/the-worlds-biggest-mammals/ vs http://www.big-animals.com/language/fr/megalodon-le-grand-requin-la-jamais-etait/ in French. Some URLs of the form http://www.big-animals.com/language/fr/english-slug/ redirect to the French version (www.big-animals.com/language/fr/limace-anglais/ ?) with the translation, others redirect to a 404. It’s bizarre.

Thanks for trying to help me nut it out!

Yes, it seems to be the Joomla2WP plugin. I’ve emailed the plugin author, perhaps he’ll fix it in a future release…