With the arrival of WordPress 6.5 comes the new format for PHP translation files.
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Program transcript
Hello, I’m Javier Casares, and you’re listening to WordPress Podcast, bringing the weekly news from the WordPress Community.
You’ll find updates from February 26th to March 3rd, 2024.
Although WordPress 6.5 is on its way, work on other parts of the project continues, such as in the Gutenberg plugin where experiments are still being added.
With Gutenberg 17.8, which will no longer include elements in the new version of WordPress, we can already see the first iterations of some components like the grid mode, which will give us access to define the sizes of the container blocks, or their size, being able, for example, to tell a block to be N rows and N columns of the grid.
Another experiment is the possibility of exporting patterns in bulk, which will generate a ZIP file with all of them.
Some other details include the possibility of having pagination in the Font Library and performance improvements.
And, in line with learning about elements of WordPress 6.5, although we already knew that Performant Translations had been integrated into this version, and that WP-CLI 2.10 included certain changes, it is now when the official launch of a new type of translation file is presented.
Until now, the most common formats for translations of a plugin and, in general, the entire system were PO and MO. With the launch of L10N.PHP, we will have PHP files that store translation strings in an array. This format allows, among other things, to be cached directly from PHP without having to be processed, and among the improvements is the process of reading all the old formats and converting them into the new, much more manageable ones.
This system also paves the way for the Preferred Languages project to make its way into future core versions, allowing for multiple prioritized languages on the site.
And the Outreach Group is already making its way among GitHub repositories allowing any project that needs general help or interconnection with other projects to do so through the user @outreach. In general, it is requested that this team be called upon in the testing phase to detect possible improvements and incompatibilities before being launched.
On the Developer Blog, a post has been released explaining how to create mega menus thanks to WordPress 6.5 and some of the functionalities it includes.
This will be possible with the combination of two elements: improvements in the navigation block, and the incorporation of the Interactivity API.
The manual explains step by step what elements need to be updated, how to configure the front end, and how to include interactions.
The Test team has prepared a table for the Contributor Day at WordCamp Asia, very focused on reviewing WordPress 6.5, just with the arrival of the first release candidate.
The focus of the latest reviews is on performance improvements of PHP translations, plugin dependencies, compliance with accessibility rules, AVIF support, and loading of JavaScript modules in classic themes.
The Design team will integrate an improvement in the Social block, which will automatically detect the URL and generate the corresponding block. In this way, if you start a URL with twitter.com, it will automatically select the social block of X.
Another element that could iterate is the inspection panel, which would bring all the contents to the detail panel in a much more suitable way.
Thus, when a page, template, or similar is selected, in the sidebar we will see the information in a much more integrated and visual way.
The Documentation team has proposed that, in the HelpHub, documentation pages include a tag indicating that it is documentation for non-technical people, as this is in the DevHub.
Additionally, something similar should begin to be done for Playground documentation, separating what is documentation for users from what is for developers.
Although a few weeks ago the pilot of the GatherPress project was announced, the Polyglots team has launched its prototype for creating events within the Translations site and integrated with GlotPress.
The idea is that this panel allows creating an event and that, if you follow it, the translation statistics during that event are synchronized separately.
And finally, this podcast is distributed under a Creative Commons license as a derivative version of the WordPress Podcast in Spanish; you can find all the links for more information at WordPress Podcast .org or follow the content in Catalan, Spanish, and French.
Thanks for listening, and until the next episode!
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