With hundreds of free and premium WordPress themes out there, you want the one you create not only to stand out, but to be as useful as possible to as many people as possible. One way to do this is to “internationalize” it. By doing this, you’re making your WordPress theme ready for translation into any of the languages that WordPress supports. It’s also easier than you think. Here’s how:
Find the functions.php file. This is located in the same directory of your theme (it’s where you set up your widgetized areas as well). If it doesn’t exist, create one.
Put this text into the functions.php file:
load_theme_textdomain ($domain);
You need to change “textdomain” to a word of your choice, something that signifies your theme. For example, if your theme is called The Black Labrador Theme, you might want to select blacklab as your textdomain. Also, make sure you put it inside php tags.
After editing your functions.php file, begin looking through the other templates in your theme. What you’re looking for is text that needs to be internationalized. For example, within the loop on an index.php page, you probably have something like this:
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<p><strong>Not Found. Please look elsewhere.</strong></p>
<?php endif; ?>
That’s text you’ll want to internationalize. To do that, you need to use either of two functions:
The _e function, for text not within a PHP function, or
The __ function, for text within PHP tags.
So for our example, you’d do this:
<?php endwhile; else: ?>
<p><strong><?php _e(“Not Found. Please look elsewhere.”, “blacklab”); ?></strong></p>
<?php endif; ?>
For text that’s already within PHP tags, such as this common WordPress tag:
<?php the_content((‘Keep reading’));?>
You’ll want to use the double underscore function. Like so:
<?php the_content(__(‘Keep reading’, “blacklab”));?>
And that’s it! If you want to learn more about internationalizing your WordPress themes, I recommend the I18n for WordPress Developers page at the Codex, and visit other excellent guides and tutorials on how to do it.
Do you internationalize your WordPress themes?
