WordPress: How To Make Themes Support Multilanguage

WordPress is a powerful blogging platform. It can support creating and using custom theme. Sometimes, people need to create their theme multilanguage supported. In this post, the technique in order to achieve multilanguage is revealed.

1. Create languages folder inside the theme folder. This folder will be used to saved translated text in .po and .mo files that created using POEdit.
2. If you don’t have POEdit, you can download it here.
3. Open POEdit, then click File, then click New..like image below.
   
4. Then, on Translation Language window, choose the language you want the theme to be translated. For example, to Indonesian, see image below.
   
5. After that, save project in languages folder you have created before.
6. Click Catalog, then click Properties. See image below.
   
7. In the Project Name and Version, fill in the project name, i.e. My Project.
8. Choose Sources paths tab.
9. In the Base path, fill in with ../, in the Paths section, add new Path .. See image below.
10. Close properties window, then click .
11. In the theme, open functions.php, then located load_theme_textdomain(...) , then set it to be like this: load_theme_textdomain ('my-theme', get_template_directory() . '/languages');.
12. After that, open all related files in theme, change all static texts into <?=__('Your Static Text')?>.
13. Back to POEdit, click  button.
14. All text that can be translated should can be seen. See image below.
    
15. Then, set the translation of each text.
16. After all texts complete, click .
17. Open your wordpress link, and add ?lang=id at the link. All static texts should be translated now in Indonesia language based on translated text you set in POEdit.