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.
During his recent talk at WordCamp San Francisco 2009 Matt Cutts mentioned a neat trick for restricting access to the WordPress admin area – adding a .htaccess file to wp-admin.
His technique (mentioned on slide 48 of the presentation slides) allows you to whitelist IP addresses that can access the wp-admin area (your home, workplace etc.) whilst denying access to everyone else. All you need to do is create a .htaccess file with the following content, fill in as many IP addresses as you want whitelisted and upload it to the wp-admin folder of your WordPress blog:
AuthUserFile /dev/null
AuthGroupFile /dev/null
AuthName "Access Control"
AuthType Basic
<LIMIT GET>
order deny,allow
deny from all
# whitelist home IP address
allow from 123.45.67.89
# whitelist work IP address
allow from 123.45.67.98
</LIMIT>
And your done! You now have full protection against nefarious types accessing your WordPress admin area courtesy of Apache.
I recently read on Ozh’s blog that WordPress is up for a nomination in the PacktPub 2009 Open Source CMS Award. The list of previous winners is rather dominated by Drupal and Joomla, so it would be good to see a change, especially if it means that more people realise that WordPress is more than just a blogging package.
Vote for WordPress! You can nominate WordPress in the Best Overall Open Source CMS and Best Open Source PHP CMS categories. PacktPub are giving away three 8GB iPod Nanos to three individuals at the nominations stage, and three 8GB iPod Touch’s to three individuals at the voting stage, all selected at random, so you have the chance to get yourself some schwag and do something good for WordPress at the same time. The nominations close on the 11th September, so get voting!
Once you’ve voted for WordPress you should encourage others to do so as well. Blog it, tweet it, spread the word!
It seems like there’s a real problem with the auto save function on WordPress at the moment, if you let the auto save kick in before pressing ‘Save’ or ‘Publish’ then all your musings are lost. Unfortunately for me I only found this out after spending about 20 mins writing a post 
It seems to be ok if you hit ‘Save’ before the first auto save hits, you’ve got about 2 minutes as far as I can tell. So the moral of this story is get in there first and press ‘Save’ yourself! Or you could always resort to offline authoring instead…
Hopefully this’ll be fixed in 2.5, I’ve seen at least 10 threads on WordPress.org complaining about it, so it seems to be quite a common problem. Roll on the 10th of March!
Edit: Dydd Gwyl Dewi hapus! | Happy Saint David’s Day!