All plugin and theme authors that added multilanguage support to their plugins and themes, should provide valid POT file with all needed translation strings. This is not required, but it saves a lot of time for the translators.

Translation process needs to produce two files, one with extension MO and the other PO. MO file is the file with actual translation, and the PO is more of a template file that looks like POT but has translation string in it. This PO file is needed if you later need to change and update translation.

There are different tools you can use to translate POT file in PO/MO files, and this post will be about POEdit. This is free and multi platform program that works on Windows, Linux and MacOS. I have noticed that POEdit is not working with plural translations as it should, at least with the ones used by WordPress.

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All my plugins have multi language support. With each plugin you will find POT file that contains base strings for translation. It’s very important to name translated files according to specification for i18n used by WordPress.

After you translate them be sure to check if the translation is working! I can’t test it with every langauge, and I will provide translation as is. If someone reports it as bad, I will remove it until something better comes along.

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And now, for something completely different. Plugin that can be used to create plugins!

Well, I am almost 100% sure that this is one of a kind plugin, and so far I am unaware of any other similar attempt: to created one base (core) class that implements all the standard code needed for a plugin to work. To use this class, extend it, set parameters through constructor, and just concentrate on writing the actual code for the plugin features. Code is tested onlyt with WordPress 2.5 and WordPress 2.6 and older WP versions will not be suported.

Add to that Wizard that can be used to create skeleton for a plugin. Set a bunch of different parameters that describe plugin features, and in a wizard folder (must have write rights) you get folder for the plugin with all needed files, and all the necessary code for start. Such plugin can be activated in WordPress and it will work immediately. Are you intrigued? Keep reading…

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I have decided to play a little with multilanguage wordpress support, and for starters I added multi language support for GD LinkedIn Badge widget plugin. There is a problem with WP_PLUGIN_DIR constant in WordPress 2.6, so I decided against using it to load domain file for translations.

Also, GD Star Rating plugin is updated again. Development on this one is going very well, and I expect to complete most of the planned features very soon. For now, I have made a lot of reorganizations, and added new stars. Statistics page is updated and improved. Controls for the plugin are changed a bit, and now you can see preview of the real size of the stars on different background. From now on, only PNG images will be used for stars, and every style will be in four different sizes.

By the end of the week, GD Pages Navigator will also going to get multilanguage support, and GD Star Rating will be updated with a lot of new features.