WordPress Multilingual

I’m proud to introduce you to Gengo 2.5 “almost stable” release, available today from the plugin download page.

Apart from some known bugs, it’s well tested on several live websites, both new WordPress installations and old Gengo-powered blogs upgraded, so I think it will help you in some way, the changelog is really huge.

Go download Gengo 2.5 and write your thoughts in the Gengo forum!

While I’m trying to fix the last things before releasing 2.5, I would like to ask your help to translate Gengo interface in other languages than english. I’ve managed to understand how to generate a new source file for translator, and now it’s in trunk. You can download it here: gengo.pot

You can use it with the latest release candidate 3 I’ve just committed :-) Some hints on how to work with this file on the WordPress Codex.

If you have an updated language file to submit, please leave a comment here, or (even better) submit it on this issue ticket. Your help will be really appreciated. Thank you!

We are quite ready to release Gengo 2.5 for WordPress 2.5+. We have two major bugs to solve (upgrade from previous versions, and some paged archives issues) but the main work has been done.

You can download the development version, watch our commit log, browse and report issues in the wp-plugins.org issue tracker (please set component to ‘gengo’) or in the Gengo support forum

Jamie Talbot, the original author of Gengo, announced his comeback in his forum, releasing a bugfix release of the regular codebase (WordPress 2.1.x).

The community effort to make Gengo working with WP 2.3 will be merged with the regular codebase, bringing back Gengo to its natural home, and the next major release will be WordPress 2.5 compatible.

This is Jamie’s post:

Hello :)

So, I’m pretty impressed with people’s continuing efforts in my absence! Sorry for the extended vacation - lots of stuff all came up at the same time, which left me no time at all for WordPress or Gengo. I’m still pretty busy, but seeing all of your efforts has given me a real sense of pride and has convinced me to continue work on it. The first step was changing hosts, in the vain hope I don’t keep getting hacked again. That happened the other day (did anyone notice, I wonder? :) )

I’ve recently seen the Google Code branch of Gengo (though I haven’t looked at the code itself), which is very cool, I must say. Those of you who have contributed to that, congratulations on your hard work - I don’t think my code is very readable at the best of times!

So, the plan: I intend to do a no-new-features-just-get-it-working release that provides compatibility with WordPress 2.5. I can’t commit to having something ready in the very short term, and I think by the time I’ve had enough time to work on it, 2.5 will be just around the corner. And as always, I can’t really support more than one WordPress version. Better to be forward looking to maximise use of my time, I think.

If you have noticed things that are currently broken with Gengo, please report them on this thread. Like I say, it will only be bug fixes and compatibility for now (this includes things like tags though, which are part of WordPress), but in the future, who knows…

Cheers,

Jamie.

Current development on Gengo seems to have stopped . We have not heard anything from the developer for some months now. I hope that everything is fine for him. Unfortunately the latest release of Gengo is not compatible with Wordpress 2.3 so f you want to continue to use Gengo “as is” you should not upgrade.

There is some work in progress in the community to fix this. Some skilled Gengo users are trying to make it work. You can download an early alpha version from the Gengo-wp23 Google code project.

The old forum on Stoatware is still working but it does not accept new users. There is a brand new forum on pixline.net

A much requested feature for Gengo just landed in trunk - as of 0.9.1-alpha-3, Gengo supports WordPress’ static front pages and page for posts. When using this feature, the following rules and caveats apply:

1. The page you choose for your front page should have a translation in every language available on your blog. This is not an unreasonable requirement, as it will be the landing page for the majority of visitors to your site and will probably be the most viewed page. If you don’t supply a translation in each language, you might get into a situation where you get 404 errors.
2. The page you choose for your posts page should be blank, have no translations and can be in any language (though you should probably choose your primary language - see item 3). This language will be ignored and the combination of languages will be chosen as it normally would for the homepage.
3. The posts page will currently only appear in the pages list if it is in a viewable language. For that reason, although you can choose any language for this page, you should probably choose your primary language. This restriction will be fixed when Gengo supports “No-Language” posts and pages, which will always appear, no matter the language.

Hopefully, this will help out the large amounts of users that have asked for this feature. It’s still new code and needs some testing, but is functional now and can be considered beta.
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Although earlier versions of Gengo had an incompatibility with the Firefox extension ‘Firebug’, that sometimes caused problems when running AJAX operations, version 0.9 moved to using WordPress’ bundled Prototype library which seems to have fixed them. However, there were still isolated reports that Gengo stopped responding for no reason, whenever a simple AJAX call was made. As AJAX is used to modify translations, summaries and snippets, it was a fairly critical problem, but there didn’t seem to be a common factor from where debugging could begin. Luckily, thanks to a comprehensive debug report by neoen in the forums, it was found that the problem was affecting servers running IIS with FastCGI (and maybe without). It turns out that the problem was as simple as a single file not being included correctly. In the latest trunk version, Gengo moves to using PHP’s own __FILE__ constant, instead of proprietary $_SERVER variables, which should make Gengo’s AJAX equally operational on all platforms from now on.
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The road to Gengo 0.9.1 has begun, with the first commit just landing on trunk. One of great things that multilingual plugins allow is for strangers who’ve never met and who don’t share a common language to work together on the same site. While many multilingual blogs are solo efforts, there are certain to be lots that are collaborative efforts. We already have quite a few contributors here at WPML, some more regular than others, who are loosely in contact and do their own thing.
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Gengo 0.9 is now available for download here. It incorporates a number of fixes, some additional template functions and, most importantly, WordPress 2.1 compatibility.

As usual, make sure you make a complete backup of your database before you perform an upgrade. When upgrading, you are strongly advised to deactivate all your plugins, activate Gengo, then reactivate all your other plugins one by one. It is possible you will see one of these two messages when activating a plugin:

“Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_currentuserinfo() in /WWW/test_wp/wp-content/plugins/gengo/gengo.php on line 1044″

“Fatal error: Call to a member function wp_rewrite_rules() on a non-object in /WWW/test_wp/wp-includes/classes.php on line 34″

If that happens, the plugin you just activated has been written incorrectly. It is trying to set its language too early, before Gengo has loaded. The solution is an easy one - the call to load_plugin_textdomain() in the plugin must be moved so that it is run on the ‘init’ hook. Do your plugin author a favour - drop them an email letting them know the problem and see if they’ll fix it - many authors don’t know that this is even a problem! Make sure you’re polite when you do, though. From personal experience, I can tell you it’s not pleasant to receive an angry email from a stranger, demanding that you fix something that you’ve released for free.

Work will now begin on Gengo 0.9.1, after a break for a couple of days. There are quite a few new features planned for the next version - stay tuned to find out more in the coming weeks.

Gengo 0.9 is nearly here. This site is now running on WordPress 2.1.2 and Gengo 0.9 Release Candidate 3. Lots of bugfixes have gone in in the last couple of weeks. If you encounter any problems using this site, be sure to let me know and hopefully we can make 0.9 a bug-free as possible…

One known issue is that the language control in the sidebar doesn’t seem to be functioning at the moment. This will be fixed up in a final release. For the time being, you’re stuck with the ordering of languages that you’ve got… Sorry about that!