I have found dozens of plugins which helps you to translate a WordPress website into different languages. However, I cannot find anything that would help me localise WordPress for different regions, all of which would still be using English language.
Let me explain. I have a website which serves MOSTLY the same content for several different regions (e.g. NYC, LA & Chicago). While page structure for each region is identical, some small bits are different between different regions. For example contact us page will have different phone number based on the region.
What I would like to do is be able to set default content & custom fields for each page, however be able to overwrite whatever I need for regional versions of each page. For example:
http://example.com/nyc/contact and http://example.com/la/contact would be mostly identical, apart from the bits which are set manually.
There are several plugins which allow doing just that but they are very much focused on multilingual websites and so come with loads of bloat and are not very convenient (especially when you have to pass them over to less technical colleagues or clients).
WPML is also a multilingual plugin (and a paid one as well), but it allows for page cloning, i.e. you could create a page for a single language and clone it to all the other languages, or change it for the scenarios where you have specific locale dependent details. It all depends on the amount of different data that you would provide for every region.
WPML also has a browser language detection which wouldn’t be very helpful if all your areas are EN based, but you could also implement an IP resolver with an external service or an existing plugin that detects the URL based on the region.
These data do not depend on the visitors language, so changing the language file is probably not a good idea. Keep in mind you have to synchronize these files each time you change any string.
Use custom fields for that, either as post meta or as theme options.
Extending @toscho Answer on using Custom Fields, I’d suggest using the plugin Advanced Custom Fields.
And pulling the content from a similar Answer I provided, here’s what you could achieve with it:
(where Normal would be one version of the text -default WP content-, and Advanced another -made with ACF)
Another plugin of interest is Custom Content Type Manager. Beside Custom Fields, it also handles Custom Posts Types, and have some features that are premium in ACF (repeatable fields).
I’m trying something similar on this at the moment.
My method is this:
The navigation bars may have same names (eg Contact), but the actual page may be contact1, contact2, etc.
Anyway – I wanted to do something without a plugin.
If you think this would be useful, let me know and I’ll share the code once finalised.