One of the great things about being a programmer is that when I have a problem, it’s pretty easy to solve it myself1.
I recently began to seriously support i18n (internationalization) in the Countdown Timer. It’s actually a pretty slick system. Everywhere I have some text that’s output in the plugin, I wrap it in a WordPress defined function that handles the translation. Then I generate a PO file using poEdit and make a MO (which is just a binary/machine object file of the PO file, which is human readable).
The issue is, if someone wanted to translate the PO file, they’d have to download poEdit, figure out how to use it, grab the PO file, translate it, make the MO file, and then send the MO file to me. This works pretty well if the users is a computer guru. But that’s not often the case.
I was hoping there would be an online PO translator, but I couldn’t find one. So I decided to make my own. Thus I present, in the form of clever titles that mash two words together, phPo Translator (or just phPo for short).
I basically wrote the code over lunch today and then decided that I should version control it. So I threw it up on Google Code, which I knew about but had never, up until this point, actually used.
Google Code is simply amazing. It took less then a minute to register and it uses SVN, which I already have installed on my computer. So I upload the code, create the tag, and away we go!
In any event, you can:
See it in action: Translate afdn_countdownTimer.po
Download phPo Translator v0.1.1
View phPo Translator Google Code page
Granted, most of my problems are probably caused because I am a programmer ↩