Multilingual WordPress for Developers

This plugin is a companion to my talk “Multilingual WordPress for Developers”. It includes practical examples and techniques covered during the session, aimed at helping developers confidently build multilingual WordPress websites.

Discover how to make the most of WordPress’s internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n) features, set up multilingual environments using multisite or plugins, and streamline your workflow with custom code — all focused on simplifying multilingual development.

Slides and presented code

The slides and code examples from the talk are available in the docs/ directory of this repository. You can view the slides online or download them for offline use.

Composer & Developer Tooling

This plugin includes a set of tools and scripts to support modern development workflows for multilingual WordPress projects.

🛠 Requirements

• PHP >= 8.1
• Node.js (for JavaScript tooling)
• WP-CLI (included via wp-cli/wp-cli-bundle)

📦 Composer Setup

The plugin uses PSR-4 autoloading for both runtime and test classes:

{
  "autoload": {
    "psr-4": {
      "lloc\\Multilingual_WP4Devs\\": "include/"
    }
  },
  "autoload-dev": {
    "psr-4": {
      "lloc\\MLWP4Devs_Tests\\": "tests/phpunit/"
    }
  }
}

Run composer install to install dependencies.

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🔍 Quality Assurance

This plugin includes comprehensive QA tooling for both PHP and JavaScript.

PHP QA Tools

Script	Description
test:php	Runs PHPUnit tests
coverage:php	Generates code coverage (HTML output)
lint:php	Runs PHPCS on all PHP files
fix:php	Auto-fixes code style issues via PHPCBF
phpstan	Runs static analysis via PHPStan
qa	Shortcut to run both code style and static analysis

Tools used:

• PHPUnit
• Brain Monkey
• PHPStan for WordPress
• WPCS (WordPress Coding Standards)

JavaScript QA Tools

Script	Description
test:js	Runs JavaScript tests using Jest
lint:js	Lints JS files using ESLint
fix:js	Auto-fixes JS code style using ESLint

Jest is configured using @wordpress/jest-preset-default.

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Unified Scripts

Script	Description
test	Runs both PHP and JS tests
lint	Lints both PHP and JS code
fix	Auto-fixes style issues in PHP and JS

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🌍 Internationalization

The plugin supports full internationalization workflows with WP-CLI:

Script	Description
i18n:pot	Generates a .pot file from translatable strings
i18n:po	Updates .po files from the .pot
i18n:mo	Compiles .po files into .mo
i18n:json	Generates .json translation files for JavaScript
i18n:php	Creates .l10n.php files for improved performance