Internationalization

Internationalization (i18n) is the process of designing and developing a software application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes. Localization (l10n) is the process of adapting internationalized software for a specific region or language by adding locale-specific components and translating text.

You will find more information about the internationalization process in the WordPress Codex.

Overview

WP Bones already supports the internationalization process for the PHP code. You can find the .pot file in the languages folder in our WPBones demo plugin and WPBones Boilerplate plugin.

<?php
 
/**
 * Plugin Name: WP Kirk
 * Plugin URI: https://github.com/wpbones/WPKirk
 * Description: WP Bones template WordPress plugin
 * Version: 1.6.0
 * Requires at least: 6.2
 * Requires PHP: 7.4
 * Author: Giovambattista Fazioli
 * Author URI: https://wpbones.com/
 * License: GPLv2 or later
 * License URI: http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-2.0.html
 * Text Domain: wp-kirk
 * Domain Path: languages
 *
 */

Under the hood WP bones uses the load_plugin_textdomain() function to load the translations.

Starting from WP Bones 1.6.0 you will be able to use the internationalization process to translate the React components and the Blocks. The plugin uses the make-pot and make-json scripts to generate the .pot and .json files.

Useful additional tools

You can also use a text editor to enter the translation. In a text editor the strings will look like this.

#: plugin-name.php:123 
msgid "Page Title" 
msgstr ""

Here are a few tools that can be used to translate PO files online:

• Transifex
• WebTranslateIt
• Poeditor
• Google Translator Toolkit
• GlotPress