Empty Stable Column on translate.wordpress.org


I was recently making some changes to my Toggle wpautop plugin in the wordpress.org plugin repository when I encountered a strange issue related to translate.wordpress.org that I wanted to share.

First, in case you are not familiar, here is a little bit of background on how translations work for WordPress.

Way back in 2013, WordPress 3.7 added support for something called language packs. When combined with Glotpress and a few automated processes behind the scenes, anyone who is multilingual with a WordPress.org account can translate plugins, themes, and even WordPress core through a simple front end interface.

This interface exists at translate.wordpress.org. As an example, here is what the translation page looks like for Akismet.

Akismet’s WordPress.org Translation page

Once a specific locale reaches the 95% translation mark, a language pack will be generated and automatically made available to anyone using the plugin on their WordPress site with that language locale selected.

Anytime you push an update to your plugin’s SVN repository, identical strings from past versions are automatically synced to the most recent versions. You can even watch this happen in the #meta-language-packs channel of the Making WordPress Slack.

Now, on to the issue that I experienced. When I pushed my updates to the plugin’s SVN repository, I noticed that the “Stable” column was empty. This was weird because “Development” and “Stable” were the same code.

Empty “Stable” column for Toggle wpautop translations.

I posted my question in related channels within the Make WordPress Slack, and Sergey Biryukov was able to give me an answer.

I had committed my new code and changed the plugin’s stable version in the plugin file’s header in the same commit. Because of this, the automated processes that generate the translations behind the scenes could not generate a list for “Stable”.

To fix this, just make a commit to the plugin’s repository. I did this by increasing the version number while leaving the stable version alone. I watched the #meta-language-packs channel for my plugin to be regenerated after doing this, and all was well.

Do you speak another language? Hop over to the Toggle wpautop translation page and spend a few minutes translating my plugin. All contributions are appreciated.

For more background info on how translations work on wordpress.org, check out these Make WordPress blog posts.

If you are a plugin or theme developer and want to learn more about using language packs in your code, read through the core handbook for Internationalizing Your Plugins, and Internationalizing Your Themes.

I hope that someone finds this helpful!

,

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *