Localization of a wordpress theme without a textdo

Question

I have a wordpress theme without textdomain (i.e. e(x) and not e(x,domain)). I also have the .po and .mo files in a folder under /themes/My Theme/localization (Notice the space name in the my theme). I would like to activate fr_FR. I created fr_FR.po and .mo and changed the wp-config to add the locale for fr_FR. However, I am still not getting the french to work. I saw many sites telling you to add a load_theme_textdomain at the top of functions.php, but I do not know what would my textdomain be. Any help will be appreciated.

Youssef

Answer 1

Add your own text domain. I did this recently to a theme which was not designed for localization, so I'm posting what I did.

Add this to functions.php

load_theme_textdomain( 'your-domain', TEMPLATEPATH.'/languages' );

where your-domain can be any name, but keep it uniform throughout all theme files.

Now go through all the theme PHP files, and do the following:

If you see _e('some text') then change it to _e('some text', 'your-domain');

If you see __('some text') then change it to __('some text', 'your-domain');

If you see "some text" without __() or _e() then,

If "some text" is used in a function call, then make it __() like above, including the text domain

If "some text" is just printed and not part of any function call, surrround it with a _e() like shown above, and don't forget the text domain.

Read the Wordpress internationalization and localization guide for more information.

Answer 2

After an unbelievably long string of forums going through the same steps of how to set it up when everything is working correctly, I finally found what was causing the issue for me.

If the server sets the global $locale before wordpress has a bash at it, then wordpress uses the server's locale settings (in the wp-includes/l10n.php file, the function get_locale).

The solution I used, is to set the global $locale right next to defining WPLANG...

global $locale;
$locale = 'am_AM';
define('WPLANG', $locale);

Answer 3

To get theme localization working, you're going to need to go through your theme and add a domain to every _e() and __() function call. this:

_e('some text');
__('some other text');

Will have to become this:

_e('some text', 'your-domain');
__('some other text', 'your-domain');

Next you'll need to add this bit of code at the top of your functions.php file:

load_theme_textdomain( 'your-domain', TEMPLATEPATH.'/localization' );

$locale = get_locale();
$locale_file = TEMPLATEPATH."/localization/$locale.php";
if (is_readable($locale_file))
    require_once($locale_file);

You can read more about it in this post.