Bring Your Own Terms Of Service » Code Sample

Hijacking WordPress Internationalisation

Paul Gibbs — Thu, 08 Apr 2010 19:27:20 +0000

As part of a new feature I am developing for the next release of my Welcome Pack plugin for BuddyPress, I needed a really smart way of dynamically adding my own translations for strings at page-load time; creating a stand-alone .mo file to load the strings wasn’t a great solution, for reasons of requiring people to know how to configure file permissions on the server, having to figure out how to write a .mo file (I wish they were as easy as XML, but they aren’t), and — honestly — doing it that way feels like such a hack.

Here’s how. Be warned that this will overwrite any translation loaded by a .mo file, but that’s exactly what I needed to do.

To add a new string into the localisation table:

function example() {
global $l10n;

$mo = new MO();
$mo->add_entry( array( 'singular' => 'Spongebob', 'translations' => array( 'Squarepants' ) ) );
if ( isset( $l10n['buddypress'] ) )  //buddypress is the textdomain
$mo->merge_with( $l10n['buddypress'] );

$l10n['buddypress'] = &$mo;
}

_e( 'Spongebob', 'buddypress' );  // This will return "Squarepants".

To change an existing string:

function example() {
global $l10n;

if ( isset( $l10n['buddypress'] ) && isset( $l10n['buddypress']->entries['%s posted an update:'] ) )
$l10n['buddypress']->entries['%s posted an update:']->translations[0] = '%s posted a monkey:';
}

Post a comment if you use this technique for anything interesting

SVN is now public

Paul Gibbs — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:42:37 +0000

I made my SVN repository public which I use for my BuddyPress plugins (Welcome Pack and Achievements). It is at http://svn.dangerous-minds.com/djpaul/.

For example, to get the latest trunk (development) version of Achievements — which requires BuddyPress trunk/1.1 — use http://svn.dangerous-minds.com/djpaul/achievements/trunk/.

Improving custom component installation

Paul Gibbs — Sat, 25 Jul 2009 18:53:08 +0000

When implementing a custom component in BuddyPress, you will often have additions for the member theme. Member themes live in their own folder, /wp-content/bp-themes/.

To render a member theme template, your component will call dpa_load_template() which takes an argument of the name of the template to load. The path is hardcoded to the /wp-content/bp-themes/ folder.

The problem with this is that after installation of a custom component, the site administrator will need to move the relevant member theme files (bundled with your component) into /wp-content/bp-themes/. This is an annoyance to site administrator, and it may end up being a frequent support request (“why is X not working?”). This very first hurdle may even stop people trying out your component.

Something else I’ve seen is that when installing future updates, people may forget that they need to move the updated member theme files into place; this can cause incompatibility issues between versions of your software, something we’ve seen with recent versions of BuddyPress.

For my upcoming “Achievements” plugin (think a cross between forum points and Xbox Live), I decided all that I wanted the site administrator to do would be to download it from the Plugins admin panel – no moving files into the member theme.

So, I present to you my code: (06/01/10 – updated for BP 1.1.3+)

bp_core_load_template( 'yourcomponent_theme_filename' );  // loads /plugins/your_plugin/filename.php

function yourcomponent_screen_filter_template( $located_template, $template_name ) {
	if ( !empty( $located_template ) )
		return $located_template;

	if ( $bp->current_component != $bp->your_component->slug )
		return false;

	if ( false !== strpos( $template_name[0], 'yourcomponent_theme_' ) ) {
		$prefix = strlen( 'yourcomponent_theme_' );
		$template_name = substr( $template_name[0], $prefix, strlen( $template_name[0] ) - $prefix );
		$template_path = WP_PLUGIN_DIR . "/your_plugin/$template_name";

		if ( file_exists( $template_path ) )
			return $template_path;
	}

	return false;
}
add_filter( 'bp_located_template', 'yourcomponent_screen_filter_template', 10, 2 );