David Decker has published his list of seven cardinal sins that he’s run into when diving into the localization/internationalization of plugins and themes. For beginners who want to start making it easy for others to localize their code, you should read this article on the Codex entitled, Translating WordPress. While David didn’t chastise developers for their code, Eric Mann weighed in from a plugin authors point of view that I think many other developers can relate to.
Category: Plugins
I’ve been intimidated by L10n and i18n but have been diving in recently. There have been some recent posts out there (not this particular article: he focuses on Pro/Premium shops) criticizing developers for not localizing, or worse not localizing well enough… but this is unfortunately sometimes aimed at hobbyists or developers who’ve released personal use plugins in the hopes that the code might be useful to someone. It’d certainly be wrong to be negative towards these developers who have released as GPL and for free. If the code is indeed useful enough, someone can contribute back to the developer in the form of a patch that internationalizes/localizes it :) It never pays though to be belligerent about a feature request (or calling a lack of feature a bug).
I’m glad that the post doesn’t demonize hobbyist developers who don’t localize/internationalize but kind of suggests that its not that tough to do. I’ve taken my best stab at it, but haven’t gotten any feedback about it as of yet.