31
Jan
2012
Today WordPress Tavern came with a post on the backlog of the WordPress Theme Review Team.
As it seems to be there are more than 80 themes in the review queue, some already for 5-6 weeks. The article goes on that even themes released by Automattic are in queue and then points to the Guidelines of releasing a WordPress theme and here is where their article stops, but it actually gets interesting!
The Guidelines for making WordPress Themes, a list of merely 11 points orso it seems. If you look further then you will notice that all these points are links going to sub-chapters of the Theme Review page on the WordPress Codex.
First up is Code Quality and here you see that all themes that are submitted for review are required to use theme-slug as textdomain for translation. Now that is a good start!
The whole Theme Namespacing paragraph is vague at best, because it doesn’t necessarily say that you have to implement it. I am sure there are thousands of people that read it like “if I am going to translate it, then I will have to use the theme-slug as the textdomain for translation, but I am not going to translate it, so what gives?“.
Second, and here it gets worse for the i18n advocates, is Functionality.
After requirements and recommendations follows one little option, like it almost has been forgotten!
Oh shit, yeah, we totally forgot about the bloody internationalization, darn!
Ah well, at least that explains why only a handful of theme developers actually care about internationalization and why even developers of premium themes don’t feel obliged to properly internationalize their themes.
That is of course the developers not interested in earning a few extra bucks, because it’s pretty obvious that an internationalized theme has a sales potential that is 4 times higher than a non-internationalized theme.
If you need help internationalizing your theme you can contact me for a quotation.
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