About Konstantin Obenland

Konstantin Obenland ist Professional Scrum Master I sowie Certified Scrum Product Owner und widmet sich seit einiger Zeit den Prozessen in der agilen Softwareentwicklung und der erfolgreichen Implementierung und Optimierung von Scrum in Entwicklerteams. Ausserdem beschäftigt er sich mit WordPress-Entwicklung und hat schon mehrere Plugins veröffentlicht.

I18n in WordPress

A few months ago – when I wasn’t as familiar with WordPress as today – I downloaded a WordPress Plugin that promised to equip single pages and posts with custom header images. I noticed, that all options in the admin area were in English, and since I set up the plugin for a friend’s website, I wanted to top off my favor by translating the English descriptions, so he wouldn’t have a hard time with them. Unfortunately the plugin was developed by an ignorant shortsighted American, so I had to put all hardcoded strings into WordPress’ translation functions myself – and translate it. A few days later (and I am not making this up) he published an update with a few minor changes and – silly me – I updated it, overwriting all alterations I worked so hard on!

My plea to all plugin and theme authors: Internationalize! It makes your plugin/theme so much more attractive for users. You don’t even have to translate it yourself. Just set it up in a way, that people can work with it – in their own languages.

In the following days, I digged deep into the possibilities of internationalization in WordPress and I would like to quickly introduce the most important functions:

PHP Namespaces: A Tool For WordPress Plugin Authors?

PHP namespaces
As part of PHP 5.3, namespaces will be a tremendous improvement for framework developers and object oriented programmers. But also for some WordPress plugin authors, namespaces might be a neat instument to easily write non conflictable code.  So instead of having to be creative in naming classes, functions and constants, authors now just have to pick a unique plugin name (as always), declare a namespace for it and can feel free to use whatever function names they like and suits best.

Sounds tempting? There’s just one minor catch to it: Authors can’t assume that the average WordPress user has PHP 5.3 up an running on their system.

WordPress Sitemap Without A Plugin

WordPress sitemap without a plugin

When it comes to sitemaps, there is a variety of solutions with a ton of features and options out there for grabs. But anyone following my entries will have noticed, that I rather add a couple of lines of code to my functions.php than using another plugin. So I tried to create a simple way to implement a sitemap in my blog. Here is what I came up with: