ClassicPress Plugin Development: Develop for Translation

ClassicPress PluginsThis post is part of the ClassicPress Plugin Development series in which I am going to look at both best practice for developing plugins and how I approach some requirements as well as some of the functions I commonly use.

When developing plugins for ClassicPress, you should plan and develop for the plugin to be translatable. There are many posts on translation of plugins for WordPress which will also apply to ClassicPress. I did a series in late 2019 on ClassicPress Plugin Development where I covered the why and how of developing plugins so they can be translated.

Two key terms in this process are internationalization (often abbreviated as i18n as there are 18 letters between the letters i and n) which is the process of developing a plugin so it can easily be translated into other languages and localization (often abbreviated as l10n as there are 10 letters between the letters l and n) is the process of translating an internationalized plugin.

Developing your plugins using the principles of internationalization, allows other to localize your plugin by translating it into their language. Plugins I develop are all in English, as that is my primary language, but having internationalized them during developed, anyone can now translate them into the language used by their site without needing to modify any code.

As I noted in this post, when I started developing plugins I did not internationalize any of the strings and then had to go back and find every single string in all the plugins, but new plugins I internationalize from the start and this takes far less effort overall.

Internationalizing your plugins will widen the market for your plugin to countries outside of those which use your language.

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