Are you with me?

For quite a while I have been helping people out in the translations section of the Genesis Support forum as a translations expert, but  one thing that people seemed to find difficult is uploading the (proper) .mo and .po files to the proper folder. Even the little hack I provided in the Genesis tutorials appeared to be too difficult for most people not too familiar with code.

So.. a plugin to the rescue right? Right! Introducing the Genesis Translations plugin. This plugin will take all the hassle away and automagically translate Genesis. Just like that.

Currently the following languages are included:

• Dutch – nl_NL (Nederlands)
• German – de_DE (Deutsch)
• French – fr_FR (Français)
• Spanish – es_ES (Español)
• Italian – it_IT (Italiano)
• Finnish – fi
• Swedish – sv_SE
• Indonesian id_ID
• Portuguese-Brazilian – pt_BR
• Polish – pl_PL ( 96% ready )
• Hebrew – he_IL ( 95% ready )
• Japanese – ja( 84% ready )
• Romanian – ro_RO ( 84% ready )

I will be updating the plugin frequently and not just when Genesis updates. I  also plan to update the plugin when important improvements to translations have been made and when additional languages are ready enough to be added.

So, what if your native tongue is not currently included? Easy, just register yourself at the StudioPress Translation site and with that username you can start translating Genesis here – after I have added your language as a project.

This post is about the first presentation I did which I dubbed: 10 Things you did not know about WordPress. I’m assuming a lot here, but just roll with me .

1. Empty Trash Automagically

   WordPress will allow you to delete it’s Trash can on set intervals. This is extremely handy when you’ve got clients using your site expecting that hitting delete really means delete. All you have to do is add this piece of code to your wp-config.php:

   define( 'EMPTY_TRASH_DAYS', 1 );

   Obviously the 1 stands for the number of days you intend to keep the deleted posts and pages available in the WordPress trash can.

2. Change Your Autosave Interval

   When you’ve worked on a post before and suddenly you’ve lost your internet connection and upon reboot discovered your post was nowhere near as complete as you thought you had, then this solution is for you. WordPress will actually allow you to set the autosave interval to the exact amount of seconds you so desire. Pretty nifty eh? Again, wp-config.php comes to the rescue here. Just add the following code and specify the preferred amount of seconds.

   define( 'AUTOSAVE_INTERVAL‘, 160 );

3. Edit Images

   Most people don’t know this, but once you’ve finished uploading your images to WordPress, there are quite a few things left you can do with said images. A while ago I made a screencast demonstrating some of the possibilities.
   

4. Maintenance.php

   When you update WordPress, WordPress plugins or WordPress themes you, as a visitor, sometimes will notice a notification that the site is currently under maintenance. This notification will be displayed without any style on a white background. Depending on your server setup this message might actually be displayed a few minutes instead of seconds. This, of course, looks awkward. Luckily WordPress allows for you to change how that plain look. All you need to do is create a maintenance.php file and place that in your /wp-content/ folder. An example can be found here. Basically, you can use whatever HTML and PHP you like, but no WordPress PHP code as WordPress is not loaded when viewing that page.

5. oEmbed

   I am amazed how many of you out there are completely ignorant about what I consider one of WordPress’ best media functions. oEmbed allows you to paste a single URL from, for example, YouTube, Vimeo, Flickr in your HTML editor and WordPress will automagically use the embed code and display the rich media according to plan. No need for WordTube kinda WordPress plugins. Just use core. Check the codex page on oEmbed for a full list.

6. Media Settings

   Most WordPress installations I come across with don’t make proper use of the Media settings. What I mean with that you can make use of the settings there. For instance, if your max width for a post is 580px you can set your medium width to that width. This way, when selecting to add media via the editor, you can pick a format that will automatically have your images perfectly fitted to the max with of your theme. No need to fiddle around in photoshop beforehand.

7. Use Child Themes

   If you’re still not using child themes in this day and age, then you really need to sit down and think this through. There is not easier way to develop, both in effort and time. One of the many reasons I use Genesis as my parent theme framework is because it’s fully optimized for working with child themes. Discover more here.

8. Use the fullscreen mode

   WordPress 3.2 came with a beautiful new and improved fullscreen editor. You can find it your TinyMCE menu bar. Go ahead and try it!

9. Screen options. Try them.

   One of the things I do by default when handing over a carefully crafted custom WordPress site to my client is making sure his login will show only what is necessary for him. Meaning, I remove everything on each and every single screen WordPress provides that doesn’t need to be there. How you ask? Easy.. just use the Screen Options menu on the right top of your Dashboard. Every single layout will have some options.

10. We’ve got shortcuts.

    For all you shortcut lovers out there, WordPress has a bunch of those too. There are shortcuts for WordPress itself, but there are also some additional shortcuts for working in TinyMCE.You can even add your own!

For good measure, my minimal presentation can be found on Slideshare.

Back to you..

Hope you had some fun discoveries reading through this list and feel free to share your own tips in the comment section.

GlotPress is based on BackPress, but it is still in early stages of development. Stable enough to provide us with a platform for teams to translate, but it’s certainly not a finished product. As a translation expert / moderator on the StudioPress forums I installed a GlotPress installation for translating Genesis,  and when Joost de Valk from Yoast.com mentioned to me he was working on making his WordPress SEO Plugin fully translated,  I suggested to him he’d start using GlotPress as well. A few moments later I had installed Joost a GlotPress installation for Yoast.com.

So, on to the topic at hand. How to use GlotPress for your translations. Follow the following steps and you should be good to go.

Installing GlotPress

If you know how to install WordPress then you know how to install GlotPress. The exception being that GlotPress doesn’t have a fancy installer. You need to find the latest version of GlotPress on in SVN trunk. After you have uploaded all the files you need to edit gp-config-sample.php to gp-config.php and edit the database data. Upload it back to your GlotPress folder and run the installation script by visiting the site url. The only extra thing you have to do is add a .htaccess file with the following content:
# BEGIN GlotPress .
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
# END GlotPress

Configuring GlotPress

By default GlotPress will allow you to login with username admin and password a, but as you can imagine, this is not the safest solution. Because GlotPress is based on BackPress it does not have a user interface. Fortunately, there is a solution for this. Additionally, since you’re using GlotPress to provide a platform for people to contribute in translating your software, you will also need a way for people to register. We can solve both those issues by creating a sub-folder in which you’ll install a WordPress installation. Mind you, the need to share the same database. Why you ask? Well, when you check the gp-config.php file you have just created you’ll notice that somewhere down the bottom of that file the following code:

/**
 * Custom users and usermate tables for integration with WordPress user system
 *
 * You might want to delet your current permissions, since they will point to different
 * users in the custom table. You can use `php scripts/wipe-permissions.php` for that.
 *
 * If you start with fresh permissions, you can admins via `php scripts/add-admin.php`
 */
// define('CUSTOM_USER_TABLE', 'wp_users');
// define('CUSTOM_USER_META_TABLE', 'wp_usermeta');

All you need to do is uncomment the first define and change to wp_users to whatever database prefix you’ve decided to use for your WordPress installation. This makes GlotPress use the users table of your WordPress installation, and you’ll notice you can log into GlotPress immediately after you’ve uploaded gp-config.php again.

Note, though the default WordPress registration function will work, it’s much cooler to use Gravity Forms and their User Registration plugin to do your registering. That’s what I used for StudioPress‘ and Yoast’s.

Create an admin

You can log in now, but you can’t actually create projects just yet. You need to do one more thing and you’ll need SSH access to your GlotPress installation for that. Log-in via ssh on your server, navigate to the /scripts folder and execute the script via

$ php /add-admin.php

. So if remkusis the username you’re using the script would look like this:

$ php add-admin.php remkus

. This will turn the specified user into the admin. You can now create projects, create sub-projects, translation sets, import .pot files and import existing .po files for current translations.

Create Validators

GlotPress works with admin, validators and translator roles. You’ve already made yourself an admin, and everyone who registered via your WordPress site is automatically made a translator. The only thing left for you to do is upgrade the proper usernames to the validator role. You can do this in the admin menu Permissions per project. This will allow for validators to approve, reject and edit strings. Just the thing you want as you’re not going to be able to understand every single language you’re going to have in there

Tips for creating a solid translation set

Working with GlotPress is very easy. You can simply double click on the string you’d like to translate and either manually translate or see what the Google Translate option does. Either way, you have to make sure that the translations you create use the same code / HTML in the translated version of the strings as the original. As a validotor you can check out the Warnings listing. This will show you all the strings that have errors in them. You will want to remove / edit those first before you start bulk approve strings.

When you create a project in GlotPress you have the option to add a Source file URL. This usually being the SVN repo link. In Joost’s WordPress SEO plugin’s case you’ll end with this link: http://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/wordpress-seo/trunk/%file%#L%line%. By adding this url you add a reference to the translation strings. You can then click on the reference link and see where in the code the translation string is used.

There will be bugs

As you probably have gathered, installing GlotPress is not for you n00bs out there. You need to be familiar with SVN, SSH, PHP to name but a few acronyms . Also, GlotPress is not a finished product, so there will be bugs. Find one? Please report them to GlotPress trac.

Need more?

If there’s a need for more tips in the shape of a screen-cast, just let me know in the comments.

But, I believe there’s something missing with all those snippets, at least in most cases. Two things: proper WordPress coding standards and inline documentation. Of those two articles on the Codex there are a few things that you should know about – whitespace, indentation & DocBlocks.

Here’s why. Not only does it make sense to adhere to WordPress coding standards when you’re building code that’s supposed to work with WordPress, but it also makes your code look good. Using function-level DocBlocks makes so much more sense when you think about it. When sharing your snippet – be it long or short – with tags like @author and @link, for example, make a few things a bit more obvious. Specifically, who the author is of the code, copyright information and the url explaining the snippet a bit more (most likely the article you have just written for that snippet). Code standards help especially in these two regards:

1. Consistency between the code you your readers will have in their projects, and the code snippet you’re giving them – no odd coding styles to have to reformat.
2. Consistency when different developers work on the same bit of code – no time spent having to learn someone else’s coding style.

Consider the following two examples:

Before:

After:

Mind you, this is not the most complicated function ever built and could thus probably do without the comments, but I wanted to get a point across here, remember? You’ll see I’ve also prefixed my functions properly, but I didn’t need to point that out to you guys, right? You all were obviously already doing that . I am by no means an expert on these matters, but I am inspired by Gary Jones – who helped write this post and whose expertise in this matter I hold in very high regard. Seeing him work on updating the code Genesis uses to the proper standards has inspired me to write this post.

So how about it? I would love to see sites like WPRecipes, WP-Snippets and WPBeginner adopt this style of writing code. I mean, isn’t this where the whole Code is Poetry starts? Also, consider pasting snippets on Github’s gists. Kinda like Pastebin, but cooler in my opinion. Your snippets are automagically turned into a Git repository. Making collaboration and code improving easier to do.

Need I explain more?

I’ve jotted down a few things I’d like to accomplish this year. My list regarding contributing to WordPress consists of the following:

• Create a WordPress plugin that is of actual use to people
• Help out and contribute more on trac
• Create WordPress themes that people love and enjoy
• Blog more about WordPress in English (again)

As you can see I’ve crossed through the first item on the list I have released my first two WordPress plugins about a week ago and my also updated one of those plugins to version 0.2. Both plugins are very similar as they both add a menu to the Admin Bar introduced in the WordPress 3.1 version. I have created plugins for clients before, but none of them saw the public light. The two plugins I created add resources to either the Genesis Framework by StudioPress or WooThemes resources.

Feels good to see people actually download something I’ve created. I don’t care if it’s not in the thousands, but anything above 25 downloads is OK in my book
Do check them out:

• Genesis Admin Bar Addition
• WooThemes Admin Bar Addition

I hope you enjoy using them as much I as have creating them.

Last year was awesome, but I dare say this edition is going to rock just as much, perhaps even more. We’ve got some great speakers and lots of international WordPress guys showing up. I am very excited to meet international speakers like @Adii (who will also bring along @mjepson and @mark_forrester of @woothemes fame), @Nacin, @w3edge and @JohnONolan and also finally meeting some of the local names like @BoweFrankema and @Milanvanbruggen.

Also, some of Automattic’s employees will be there as well. @Isaackeyet will actually be speaking this year also, he attended last year as well, but also @_Zef and someone I forgot right now, sorry.

Last, but certainly not least will have to be the mention of @twittgrinder, an Italian Genesis enthousiast and friend who will visit WordCamp NL from Italy and he’ll be staying at my place for a few days. Very much looking forward to meeting all of you guys, but also, looking forward to meeting all of you attending.

See you soon!