Writing WordPress plugins so they’re available in every language is a big ask. Which is why it’s taken us a while to release the latest version of WordPress Mobile Admin (3.0) as this was the major focus for the release.
Internationalization (or I18n for short) is the process of making an application ready for translation. In the WordPress world, it means making sure that everywhere a bit of human readable text is output to the browser, it’s wrapped in a function. And when WordPress does its magic and works out what goes where, those bits of text are translated on the fly according to whichever POT language file you have installed.

Trouble is – the old version of WordPress Mobile Admin didn’t have any of the human readable text wrapped in those functions so it was only available in English, despite the fact that probably 95% of the text it used had already been translated. By going through and wrapping those text segments has meant that the entire Mobile dashboard has been mobilized.

Internationalization was where we spent most of our time on for this release, but it wasn’t the only focus. In addition, we’ve looked at textarea boxes and in particular, anywhere you can enter text in the mobile dashboard – editing posts and pages for example.

We found that some phones have troubled scrolling with lots of text in text input boxes (iPhone’s for example), so we’ve added some JavaScript in to help things run a bit smoother. And because we’re using Wapple Architect, phones that don’t support JavaScript don’t get it.

We hope you enjoy the update to the plugin and would love to hear from you if you use WordPress Mobile Admin in a language other than English and if you use an iPhone and scrolling is a bit nicer!

Head of Development at Wapple

Connect me on Twitter | LinkedIn | Website