#Poedit tutorial wordpress how to

These are the simplest translation functions that WordPress has to offer. _x() is mainly used where single words are used. It is important for the translator to know which you mean when translating to be accurate. 'Post' could mean 'a post (noun)' or 'to post (verb)' depending on context. _x() – Useful for when the translation of the word depends on the context._n() – Used when the text has the potential to be plural, so for example if you were to display how many comments have been made, you might want to output either 'X comments' or 'X comment' depending on how many comments you have._e() – The same as _() except it echoes the text instead of returning it.It returns the text in the correct language. _() – (two underscores) The basic function that you will use the majority of the time.By using machine code, the file can be used much faster than its plaintext alternative.Įach of the four functions requires at least one argument, which is the text that is to be translated. mo (Machine Object) – A binary version of the. This is also a plaintext file that can be edited. po contains all your string references as well as their translations to one specific language. This file does not contain any translation. pot (Portable Object Template) – This is the template file that contains a reference to each text string in your theme that needs translating. There are three translation files that we use: Once you have your text wrapped in these functions, you can create a file containing all the translations that is referenced every time the theme is loaded. The solution to this is to return or echo these statements using one of four WordPress functions which are designed to reference a language file for the correct text. If the user's WordPress is German for example, these snippets of text will still display in English. When you usually make a theme, you will simply hardcode any theme text such as the 404 error message in the 404.php file, or labels such as 'comments:' or 'author:'.

#Poedit tutorial wordpress how to

I'm going to show you how to make yours one of them. As of writing this, there are only 269 themes in WordPress' theme database that are tagged as translation-ready out of more than 1,500 themes. Out of the top 10 countries that search Google for 'WordPress themes', only one is native English speaking (the USA) and that comes 9th. It's very easy to turn a blind eye to other languages when developing your WordPress theme, but this is a very bad habit and immediately turns away a whole market of WordPress users and potentially thousands of dollars in lost revenue.