WordPress Multilingual

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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I’m happy to report that the latest version of Dr. Dave’s excellent Spam Karma, version 2.3 is now compatible with Gengo. The previous issue of the text domain loading too early has been fixed, which means all Gengo users can now enjoy spam free blogs without any headaches. Cheers Dave!

After this excellent suggestion from Georg, this site is now open for contributions from all and sundry. If you have something to share about multilingual blogging, the state of localisation technology, want to get something off your chest about Right to Left handling, or else just want to share your experiences, just register, login and go for it.
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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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Mocha provides localisation tools for WordPress, allowing plugins, themes and the WordPress core to be translated into different languages from within the admin section.

Download Mocha 0.1.6 now!

Features

• Have your entire WordPress powered blog localised in your language.
• Intuitive user interface: Just select a plugin or theme and fill in the translations.
• See changes reflected on the site immediately, without constantly editing and re-uploading.
• Mocha saves the translated strings (such as “Search” or “posted by”) in standard .po and .mo files which you can share.
• Automatic update of localisation files.
• Support for “fuzzy” translations.
• Retrieves the latest .pot localisation template for WordPress automatically after upgrading.
• Works also with Gengo for multilingual blogs.
• User support in the forum.
• It’s free!

Requirements

• WordPress 2.1.2 or higher (?)
• The gettext tools installed on your server: For most *nix servers they should already be there. For Windows servers, you’ll have to find and install the gettext .exe and .dll files and install them to wp-content/mocha/lib/. You can find these, for example, as part of the poEdit distribution.
• PHP5 (a PHP4 compatible version will be available soon)
• A “gettext-ed” Theme (see Translating WordPress for more information on gettext).

Installing Mocha

1. Download the latest version of the Mocha plugin and decompress the .zip file.
2. Copy the mocha directory in the zip file to wp-content/plugins/.
3. Activate the plugin on the Plugins screen.
4. You’ll be redirected to the Mocha Options page where you can fill in the locale and the language name (Gengo users don’t need to do this): The locale should match what you have set WPLANG to in wp-config.php (e.g., “pt_BR”). The “language” field should contain the name of the blog language (e.g., “Português”).

We are looking for people who are willing to write a couple of posts on a semi-regular basis, on the theme of Gengo and multilingual blogging with WordPress. The criteria to join are easy:

1. We must kind of know you — that means, you’ve had a couple of posts in the forum, have contributed localisation files, or are active with the multilingual WordPress scene in some way that we know about.
2. Gengo and WordPress must be available in your language. This means, if Gengo or WordPress isn’t available in your language, you’ll have to translate it. We want the site to showcase all that Gengo can offer, which includes fully translated everything. We might also get a few new translations out of it.
3. You must be fluent in at least two languages. They don’t have to be English. We want to get as much overlap as possible, so we (you) can translate each other’s posts.

You’ll be given full admin access, so we have to trust you. Feel free to let others know about this — we’ll also be happy to grant lower level privileges to others, if they come recommended by someone trustworthy.

There’s no money involved, but you’ll get good karma, and maybe we can do something useful. Anyone wishing to pitch in, register here and leave a message in the comments section of this page!

Young Executive has a roundup of available translation plugins for WordPress. It does manage to list many of the solutions available, but unfortunately contains factual errors. For some reason, Gengo is put in its own group and described having your own server translate content automatically. This is entirely incorrect - with Gengo, all translated content is human written. Gengo is more like the language switching plugins described in section 3, except that it intelligently determines which content to present to you, rather than downloading it all and then hiding it.
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