WordPress discriminates international users
This is NOT April Fool’s joke!
It is surprising to see that WordPress, with translations in lots of languages, actually doesn’t welcome efforts to have it properly internationalised.
From this discussion, it is said that an RTL (right-to-left) language support to WordPress theme is said to be ‘intrusive’. Being intrigued at what intrusive means? Here is the relevant change concerning the RTL support, which involves 2 lines of code change, an extra CSS file not used by default, and a few images which is supposed to be localized image files. And this RTL setting is not even enabled by default. Now, THAT particular comment is even more intrusive than the change itself, because it means people not in Europe or America should be denied the right to improve their language support, and anything better is at the mercy of English-speaking and European-language-speaking people.
Despite the fact some WordPress developers see the need for proper I18N in order to be adopted worldwide, some others reject such belief, such as:
- claiming any non-English and non-European language as a ‘minority’
- any localised theme would ’scare away’ theme designers
- etc, etc
Since history begins, localisation of applications has always been an uphill battle, mainly due to the difficulty to adopt every kind of difference between various languages, like punctuations, number formats, monetary formats, date/time formats, string ambiguity, to name a few. In recent years, some progress has been made, and a few large categories of obstacles (like RTL support, CJK support) is no more an unsolvable problem. Any software without proper I18N support is mainly due to lack of I18N knowledge or simple ignorance without receiving improvement requests; but this kind of blatant disregard is rare in today’s world, when globalization is one of the vital element to worldwide adoption.
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[...] I18N), but the WordPress demigod (Matt Mullenweg) instead, the same WordPress demigod who thinks I18N is just for ‘minorities’. Otherwise I can’t think of anybody else, because so far I only see him eager at making [...]
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[...] want to make it usable for most people in the world, Matt Mullenweg resisted this idea with plain blank refusal. Well, at least there is a final answer now. First the (old) news: the default theme won’t be [...]
This is totally outrageous, today is not like 15 years ago that i18n requires lots of skills, it’s no longer a work that only programmers can accomplish. I understand that the author doesn’t want to complicate the default theme, but wrapping strings to make themes localizable will hurt theme designers is not a valid argument, as making good themes require some basic PHP knowledge anyways.
I am not surprised about Wordpress. They are just too busy shooting themselves in the foot to recognize discrimination when they see it. I believe that in this global world we live in, blog sites need to be fully supportive of many languages. I rejected site hosting where the host has a rule of “English only” as I refuse to support anyone who supports discrimination.
The author is crazy in his arguments because any programmar can make themes that work with multi-languages! Plus, how many people would care that they get RTL language support but only 1 theme choice? I’d rather have the RTL support then many themes choices! I agree with Anthony Wong that to make a good theme does require basic PHP knowledge! Oh well, authors loss. I’m sure some people here could make a cool blog site that has RTL support and can be made more popular than wordpress could even dream of! My programming isn’t that good yet. I’m still learning JavaScript and haven’t started learning PHP yet.
Best Wishes! RTL and LTR for ALL!
To call this discrimination is a misrepresentation. The intention is to have all translators do an in-line translation of the default theme rather than using gettext because gettext adds a bunch of noise to the templates that can annoy end-users when they try to tweak their theme, regardless of the language they speak. The choice was made to burden translators instead of users. Whether you agree with this approach or not, it was not done to discriminate.
RTL support is enabled by the translator. The translator can set a flag that tells WP to load the RTL stylesheets for the admin and the active theme. The RTE is set up for RTL and paragraph text direction buttons are added to the button bar when the RTL flag is set. We work closely with the Arabic and Persian teams on RTL support.
WordPress is completely gettexted with the exception of the default theme. We are very conscientious of being charset agnostic and multi-byte language safe. A great amount of time and care has gone into i18n support in WP.
Given the discussion I saw on the net, and the few months of observation in wp-polyglot, it is hard to come to any other conclusion. I’m not convinced yet that it’s my misinterpretation, though still free to change my mind if something different happens.
Yes, I know you and some others are working hard on making WP usable for more and more people across the globe, but what I want to know is the bare truth, not just sweet words — especially what it is like INSIDE automattic, not anything in public.
And the burden thing is a non-argument. How many are really changing the DEFAULT THEME? If users do change theme, they wouldn’t CHOOSE default theme to tweak, there are many more better and prettier out there. Most people using default theme are because they don’t want to do much or don’t know how to code — just Joe users. This is Matt’s quasi-reasoning, not some REAL reasoning.
WP have never encouraged third-party theme developers to make i18n-ready themes, either. It’s not just that the default theme is hardcoded in English; there is no documentation on Codex about how to prepare themes for translation, nobody on the support forums knows anything about it, and I only finally found out how to do it properly by begging for help on wp-polyglots. So, basically, the reason you don’t see most designers making i18n-ready themes is because it isn’t officially supported and they don’t know how.
To that girl again:
… which matches in line with Matt’s thinking that each and every theme must only be usable by people using the same language as the theme designer does.
I think that it would be very easy to have 1 default theme per how many ever language groups you want to support, with that default theme being in the language of that group. If a French person wanted to use the default Manderin Chinese theme, then the French user would have to struggle with the language barrier. The Chines person would stop struggling, and would have a default theme they could tweak. It shouldn’t be that hard to do this, I wouldn’t think. Yes, this does come from a person who wants to learn to speak 6 different modern language fluently, and 4 others well enough to communicate effectively in.
Admittedly, I am at an advantage to other users. I am used to taking programs in languages I do not know and tweaking it for my purposes. Granted, even I would have trouble with languages not using the Roman alphabet, but it really isn’t that difficult.