chengis.me

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Recently I’m doing some wordpress theme designing for XMind Ltd. They want a blog for multi-language support. Since it could be useful for many people, I would like to share my experiences.

我最近在给Xmind这家公司做一个多语言的Blog模板，感觉效果还不错，把我的经验共享一下：

The theme is based on a clean blue theme “Cold Blue” which matches the company’s color scheme perfectly and it’s free. I made some changes so that it looks better for me. But the problem is the theme has no support for multilingual. So I have to dig into the theme PHP files and manually change that. So:

我的模板是下载的 “Cold Blue” 这个比较简洁的模板，我很喜欢，但是它并没有多语言的支持，所以我只好手动修改PHP文件，下面介绍一下如何把一个模板加入多语言的支持。

How to add multilingual support for a theme?

The answer is: You have to tell wordpress which is a multilingual string.
Like said in this blog, you first register a name for yourself in function.php.

你要做的就是在模板里把需要翻译的地方标记出来，先要在function.php里面给你的模板注册一个名字，这样才能在里面使用。


load_theme_textdomain('coldblue')


And in other theme files, you can now tell wordpress which are multilingual strings in your file. Basically there are following things you may want to use:

然后在模板里，看到一段字符串就把它们替换成下面的写法吧。注意一下_e('','')是直接输出，适用于一般的文字内容。而__('','')是返回一个字符串，这样可以放在其它函数里面调用。如果对于比较复杂的情况，可以使用printf来输出。不明白可以看我提供的下载里面是怎么用。

<?php _e('Hello world', 'coldblue') ?>
<!--Will output the string directly--!>
 
<?php some_function( __('Hello world', 'coldblue') ) ?>
<!-- Returns a string for function use --!>
 
<?php printf(__('Sometimes %s and %s and %s'),$a1,$a2,$a3);?>
<!-- Complicate things--!>

So you need to change every possible strings in your theme into multilingual notations. And after that you can ask the tool gettext to find those things for you!

一旦标记完成了之后，就可以用gettext工具把所有标记过的东西查找出来，如下：

cd wp-content/themes/coldblue
find . -iname "*.php" > files.tmp
xgettext --language=PHP --indent --keyword=__ --keyword=_e \ 
--keyword=__ngettext:1,2 -s -n --from-code=UTF-8 -f files.tmp

Then you will get a file calledmessage.po. You may rename it for your locale setting, like zh_CN.po, and edit the first lines of the file like this:

然后得到一个message.po的文件，然后你可以把它重命名一下，把开头的一段话改成以下的样子：

msgstr  "Project-Id-Version: PACKAGE VERSION\n"
        "Report-Msgid-Bugs-To: \n"
        "POT-Creation-Date: 2009-08-03 17:35+0800\n"
        "PO-Revision-Date: YEAR-MO-DA HO:MI+ZONE\n"
        "Last-Translator: FULL NAME \n"
        "Language-Team: LANGUAGE \n"
        "MIME-Version: 1.0\n"
        "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8\n"
        "Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit\n"
        "Plural-Forms: nplurals=2; plural=1 != 1;\n"

And then translate items one by one in .pofile. Once you finished, a compile job is needed:

当把.po文件里面的所有行都翻译过了之后，可以把它编译成机器识别的.mo文件

msgfmt -o zh_CN.mo zh_CN.po

There are some tricky things about the date format. My way is to make the date format string multilingual:

对于一些比较麻烦的事情比如日期格式，其实可以把它本身就设成多语言字符串，这样就可以分别独立进行设置了。其实不同语言的格式也是可以随便改的，把css地址也设成多语言字符串，然后你就知道怎么回事了吧。

get_the_time(__('F jS, Y','coldblue'))

msgid	"F jS, Y"
msgstr	"Y年n月j日"

You may need to edit wp-config.php to change define ('WPLANG', 'zh_CN'); for a refresh, or simply wait for the next thing:
如果对于一般应用的话，可以直接改wp-config.php来设置语言，但这并不是真正的多语言。

How to add multilingual contents?

A very nice plugin called WPML. It will:

我找到的一个插件是WPML，简直是为我量身定做。

• Allow you to create translations of posts or pages manually. (I don’t want the “Google Translate” way. 可以为每篇日志创建不同语言的版本而不是用Google翻译的办法。
• Skip contents if no translation is available. So the page will look native. 如果没有相关语言的文章版本，可以设置直接不显示。
• Setup the theme locale for each language. 为不同的语言版本设置不同的模板语言文件，我们刚才做的那些东西就可以用上了。
• Translate widget titles, blog titles, tags and categories. 可以设置翻译各处的小标题，标签名，分类名，保证不留死角。

You may follow the manual of the plugin which is very clear about everything. I just want to show some screenshots: 具体如何设置看它的手册已经写得很清楚了。我只是大概贴几张截图，大体介绍一下。

Setting translation for posts: 设置文章的版本

Setting widget titles: 设置小标题

Theme properties, you know how to use the .mo, .potranslations now. 模板的语言设置

And of course I would like to share the modified theme to you. 就知道有人想坐享其成，欢迎笑纳。

Click to Download

However I’m not yet so interested in making a multilingual site myself, I think writing them together is fine for a normal blogger

不过现在我还不打算用那种方式来多语言，对于我一个平头百姓来说，这样英汉混杂大家不影响理解也就好了。