Whilst working on some updates to my WordPress plugins recently I have discovered some excellent resources covering the subject of making plugins translatable:
- The I18n for WordPress Developers page in the WordPress Codex covers all the basics and should get you started.
- John Godley (aka. Urban Giraffe) covers the topic in more detail, including the finer points of translating plurals, and the use of printf() instead of _e(). He also provides a companion article that approaches localisation from the point of view of the person doing the translation, something that is often overlooked.
- Finally Austin Matzko (Pressed Words) provides a succinct summary of internationalisation, including a look at Poedit, a cross platform editor for the translation files.
There is really no reason not to translate your WordPress plugins and themes, it requires minimal effort and can vastly improve the experience for users who’s first language is not the same as yours.
As part of a recent upgrade on this site I installed the latest version of the excellent K2 theme, taken from the nightly builds. Following the upgrade I noticed that although comments were still intact on posts, they were missing from pages. All the old comments still existed in the admin backend, but they were not shown on any pages, and neither was the comment form. I discovered that since revision 747 of K2 it is necessary to have a custom field called ‘comments’ associated with a page in order for any comments or the comments form to be displayed. This leads to a problem in itself; if you try to add an empty custom field to a page then a rather unhelpful error message is displayed and the operation fails. The solution is to give the ‘comments’ field a dummy value, anything will do as it is never displayed. Save the page and voilà: any existing comments and the comments form will resurrected below the content.
The moral of the story? If you want the latest and greatest version, at least spend five minutes reading the changelog!
I have recently discovered that Windows Live Writer is a really rather good tool for editing your blog. As well as Windows Live Spaces it also supports other popular tools including SharePoint, WordPress and Blogger. Predictably I’m using it for this post after spending all of ten minutes installing and configuring it. If offline editing is on your wish list then this is well worth a try.
So you’ve decided its a good idea to let Google manage the email for your domain? You’ll find after sign up that you have to prove you own your domain. The easiest way to verify your ownership of the domains is to upload a page called googlehostedservice.html to the root of your domain. Unfortunately, the Google help page isn’t to helpful on the format, so here’s an example:
<!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.0 Transitional//EN">
<html>
<head>
<title>googlehostedservice</title>
</head>
<body>
googlexxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
</body>
</html>
Replace the line starting googlexxx etc. with the one they supply you during the setup process, upload the page to the root of your domain, your sorted. You can then go back to the setup page, click verify and the process should complete in less than 48 hours.