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:
