Comments on: Protecting text strings from theme upgrades

By:

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 09:38:42 +0000

An interesting thing here, is that it opens doors for guys like me, that writes about life in the kitchen and my “well-known” recipes, with a twist of daily stories.

I have tried out every single multilanguage plugin there is, but i cant seem to get any of them to work properly! YET.

With a localized theme it might just be posible and maybe i dont have to post recipes in english elsewhere, but on the “english” site of my blog!-

By: Justin Tadlock

Justin Tadlock — Sun, 13 Jul 2008 01:20:38 +0000

J Mehmett
Here’s a little something I just found out. The Default WordPress theme isn’t even localized! I haven’t looked at that for a while, but I just happened to open it the other day and noticed it.

gofree
The good thing is that you can’t possibly mess up your theme using this method. If something goes wrong, you only have to worry about one file. In the long run, it might be worth it to learn PoEdit.

Ptah Dunbar
Now, I’m interested. That could be a neat way to do it.

Maybe if you could set up a theme options page with all the text strings, it could work. What would be even neater would be if you could have the options page auto-generate the .mo and .po files. That way, you wouldn’t have to hack up your theme files getting theme options for every string.

By: Ptah Dunbar

Ptah Dunbar — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 02:52:09 +0000

This is a pretty cool idea. But the perfectionist in me makes me want to take out the middle man “poedit” and create an interface via PHP for this. hmm…

By: WordPress Weekend Resources - June 20, 2008 | Theme Lab

WordPress Weekend Resources - June 20, 2008 | Theme Lab — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 12:33:07 +0000

[...] Protecting text strings from theme upgrades – This post by Justin Tadlock goes over how to make your themes translatable. I’ll admit, this is something I do not do with the themes on Theme Lab, but I may start after reading this. [...]

By: Cool coding tips from around your WordPress community - part 1 — WP Project

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 06:05:09 +0000

[...] Tadlock talks about theme localization, and reveals how to protect your text strings from theme upgrades. Have you ever wanted to change some text that reads “Continue reading” or “Post written [...]

By: gofree

gofree — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 15:14:23 +0000

Edit : I do want to add that it would be more complicated for first-time users of Poedit though.

This is what i am going to back off! I have always wonder how to not destroy my already customized theme, but now it seems a bit more work for a noob like me

By: J Mehmett

J Mehmett — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 14:56:24 +0000

I’m not sure why WordPress accepts non-standard localization file names. But, here’s a question. What if WP only accepted standard names and someone wanted to create a site purely based on an Elvish language (Lord of the Rings)?

Of course that’s why WordPress is independent.

I do agree though that plugin and theme authors could really help out the community by adding a few extra lines of code to their themes. The average theme wouldn’t have too many strings to change anyway.

WordPress was designed to help all, and to produce better open source world. Localization is part of better WordPress.

By: Justin Tadlock

Justin Tadlock — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 13:24:25 +0000

J Mehmett I'm not sure why WordPress accepts non-standard localization file names. But, here's a question. What if WP only accepted standard names and someone wanted to create a site purely based on an Elvish language (Lord of the Rings)? Hey, it could happen. I do agree though that plugin and theme authors could really help out the community by adding a few extra lines of code to their themes. The average theme wouldn't have too many strings to change anyway.

By: J Mehmett

J Mehmett — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 06:38:19 +0000

Truely man WP plugin and theme authors ignore the idea of localization which affects the end-users. By the way I wonder why WordPress accepts non-standard localization filenames like mycrazylanguage.po as define ('WPLANG', 'mycrazylanguage'); instead of accepting only gettext standards such as en_US.po/en_US.mo or en_EN.po/en_EN.mo defined in WP as define ('WPLANG', 'en_EN'); Nice tip, JT.

By: Justin Tadlock

Justin Tadlock — Wed, 18 Jun 2008 04:42:27 +0000

Richard H
Localizing themes can open up a theme author to an entirely new audience. I believe since I started doing this, I’ve gotten a lot more international users willing to use the themes.

David
For protection against theme upgrades — no, it won’t be used much. It was just a neat idea I thought about doing and figured I’d post it as kind of a twist on how localization works.

It’s actually not hard to implement. If the English .po file is available, all a user has to do is load the file in Poedit and translate whatever strings they want. It could literally take less than 5 minutes.

Edit : I do want to add that it would be more complicated for first-time users of Poedit though.