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WP-Andreas09 Widgets and Localisation

I thought I would write a post to answer a few questions that I have been asked about WP-Andreas09 just in case others are asking the same questions.

How do I enable Widgets?

  1. Download the Widgets plug-in from: http://automattic.com/code/widgets/
  2. Unzip and upload the whole Widgets folder to /wp-content/plug-ins/
  3. Activate the Widgets plug-in from the WordPress Plug-ins page.
  4. Navigate to the Presentation page and you should now see a Sidebar Widgets tab.
  5. Simply drag and drop the available Widgets to the sidebars as you want.

What is Localisation?

Localisation, or more accurately “prepared for localisation”, is a feature that enables you to translate a theme by editing only 1 file rather than all the template files. WordPress itself is prepared for localisation in exactly the same way.

A theme is prepared for localisation by tagging each test string with special keys so that they can be found by a catalogs editing tool. One such tool is PoEdit. PoEdit will compile a catalog of text strings ready for translation and can also be used for making the translation. Once the catalog has been compiled it is saved as a file with the extension of .pot (wp-andreas09.pot)

To translate a theme that is prepared for localisation you open the .pot file with PoEdit. This will allow you to view all the text strings that have been marked for translation and translate them one by one. Once your translation is complete you can then export a binary version of the .pot file that this time has the extension of .mo (wp-andreas09.mo). This is the file that WordPress uses to replace the default text strings with the translated text strings on the fly when it is viewed in the browser. Next you need to rename the .mo file with the country code of your translation, for instance a German translation would need to be renamed de_DE.mo.

Please note that to enable the translation the WPLANG setting in wp-config.php has to be set to your country code. using the German example above this would be de_DE.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 25th, 2006 at 9:28 pm and is filed under WordPress, WordPress Themes. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

4 Responses to “WP-Andreas09 Widgets and Localisation”

  1. Karl R. Says:
    April 27th, 2006 at 10:13 am

    Hi,
    i know this is not a theme related question. The search function for the blog does not mark the specified search expression in the result set. Exists a plug in with goggle like results for the own blog?

    Greetings
    Karl

  2. Ainslie Says:
    April 27th, 2006 at 8:27 pm

    I’m not aware of a plugin that does this. Anybody else seen one?

  3. HeroHacker Says:
    May 1st, 2006 at 6:51 am

    Hi Webgazette.co.uk webmaster, i recently download your theme Wp-andreas09 version 2.0 and i make a Spanish Translation (localization)for this theme, i want give to all your visitors and fans of this great theme, the translation is very clean and perfect, the link to download is http://www.comuni-kt.net/downloads/wp-andreas09-v2-Es_Es.zip

  4. Richard Gatarski Says:
    May 9th, 2006 at 1:36 pm

    Ainslie, thanks for the nice port to WP! I have made a translation into Swedish (UTF-9 and ISO-8859-1) which can be downloaded from http://www.podernize.se/shared/wp-andreas09_sv.zip. First time I do this, so I hope I got it right. I found that it would help enormously if you had used the commenting function in the catalog file to indicate the context of where the words/phrases are used.
    Cheers,
    /richard