Modern Translation File Generator for WordPress

Previously WordPress developers needed to use makepot.php to generate the .po files necessary for translation.

This WP CLI command allows you to generate different types of translation file from WP code and also convert between types easily.

Supported translation file types are:

• CSV
• CSV Dictionary (no plural support)
• JSON
• JSON Dictionary (no plural support)
• mo
• PHP Array
• po
• jed
• xliff
• YAML
• YAML Dictionary (no plural support)

Installation

You can install the command as WP CLI package (Recommended):

wp package install roborourke/wp-l10n-gen

Using composer:

composer require roborourke/wp-l10n-gen

As a plugin:

git clone git@github.com:roborourke/wp-l10n-gen.git 
cd wp-l10-gen
composer install
wp plugin activate wp-l10n-gen # (or activate via wp-admin)

Usage

More docs to come soon, to see options for now run:

wp l10n generate --help
wp l10n convert --help
wp l10n po2mo --help

Roadmap

• Improve generated headers
• Documentation for use with JS based projects?

About

Being frustrated with the existing tools for generating translation files I wondered if there was a better way that more closely tied in with the modern ways we interact with WP via the command line now.

Looking to other PHP Projects and how they manage translations was a useful exercise although WP's translation function don't follow the usual standards. A bit of hacking later and I was able to get Oscar Otero's excellent Gettext library working with WordPress code.

Contributing

It's very early days yet but if anyone finds this useful and wants to contribute please go ahead. You'll find my outline for a roadmap above and plenty of TODO comments in the code.

License

GPLv3+