Author: Ian Grieve

This series is part of the Translating a ClassicPress plugin with Poedit series.

Poedit is a popular tool for translating app and plugins which use the gettext libraries; in this series, I am going to take a look at both installing Poedit and using it to translate a ClassicPress plugin.

This series if a is part of the Translating a ClassicPress plugin series.

With the plugin internationalized and next step is to localize it by translating it into another language. There is a number of tools available which can be used to do this. As part of this main series, I am going to cover two of the commonly used tools for translating plugins.

The first is an application called PO Edit which describes itself as the fastest and most convenient way to translate apps and sites with gettext.

The second is the GlotPress plugin for WordPress which works seamlessly with ClassicPress. GlotPress can also be used to translate apps and sites with gettext, but with the added benefit of collaboration.

This post is part of the sub-series on Internationalizing a ClassicPress plugin which is part of the Internationalizing a ClassicPress plugin series.

With the strings of a plugin internationalized, the final step in the internationalization of a plugin, is to add the action to load the translation file:

function myclassicpressplugin_init() {
    $plugin_rel_path = basename(dirname(__FILE__)).'/languages'; /* Relative to WP_PLUGIN_DIR */
    load_plugin_textdomain('my-classicpress-plugin', false, $plugin_rel_path);
}
add_action('plugins_loaded', 'myclassicpressplugin_init');

This post is part of the sub-series on Internationalizing a ClassicPress plugin which is part of the Internationalizing a ClassicPress plugin series.

Internationalization of a plugin is firly straightforward, but there is one gotcha with regards to line breaks in translatable strings to avoid.

The gettext libraries used for internationalizing a plugin do not work well with \r (ASCII code 13) so \n (ASCII code 10) should be used instead.

This post is part of the sub-series on Internationalizing a ClassicPress plugin which is part of the Internationalizing a ClassicPress plugin series.

When internationalizing a plugin, you should avoid including a URL in the translatable string.

While for ease it may be tempting to do this:

esc_html_e('Please visit <a href="https://development.azurecurve.co.uk/">azurecurve Development</a> for more details.','your-text-domain');

You should instead paramaterize it by doing this:

printf(esc_html__('Please visit %s for more details.', 'your-text-domain'), '<a href="'.esc_url('https://development.azurecurve.co.uk/').'">azurecurve Development</a>');

If you have a URL where you want the anchor text to be translated, you can do this:

printf(esc_html__('Please %sLogin or Register%s to leave a comment.', 'your-text-domain'), '<a href="'.esc_url('https://development.azurecurve.co.uk/login.php').'">', '</a>');

Using a printf or sprintf function will allow you to paramaterize the URL and prevent a translator from substituting your domain for a different one.

This post is part of the sub-series on Internationalizing a ClassicPress plugin which is part of the Internationalizing a ClassicPress plugin series.

When internationalizing a plugin, you should, as far as possible, avoid including HTML markup in the localization strings.

Annoyance the First: Thou shalt not put unnecessary HTML markup into the translated string. For example, a heading should not be included in the translatable string like this:

$str = esc_html__('<h3>Section 1</h3>', 'plugin-text-domain');

Instead, it should be included outside the translatable string like this:

$str = '<h3>'.esc_html__('Section 1', 'plugin-text-domain').'</h3>';

This isn’t a rule as such, but more of a guideline. It is sometimes necessary to include HTML markup when emphasis is being added to a specific word where the emphasis in another language may be different. However, bear in mind, that even when the emphasis may be on a single word, you still don’t necessarily need to include it in the translatable string:

$str = sprintf(esc_html__('There are %d lights.', 'plugin-text-domain'), '<em>'.$number.'</em>' );

Another approach to get the same result is to include the markup as the text to replace the placeholders; for example:

$str = sprintf(esc_html__('The cave is %svery%s deep.', 'plugin-text-domain'), '<em>', '</em>' );