And if you need just one language, but not English?

I’m pretty sure that you already know that you can run multilingual sites with WPML. Still, many of your sites need just one language, and often, not English. So, how do you get the localized WordPress builds for these sites?

We’ve just released WPML’s kid brother, called WordPress Language. You can download it for free from the WordPress Repository download page.

WordPress Language lets you switch the admin language and will download translations for WordPress core. This means that you can download WordPress from the standard (and always up-to-date) English download and get the translations from WordPress Language.

If you run many sites for many clients, some in that language and some in another, you no longer need to bother with the (too many) localized WordPress builds. Use the standard WordPress install for all these sites. Between us, I think that this should have been in WordPress core a long time ago, but at least, not you can get it as a plugin. It’s a start.

WordPress Language Features

Just like the new stuff in WPML 2.6.0, our new WordPress Language will let you select languages and locales.

Then, it looks up the best available translation and downloads it. But, it doesn’t even save that translation locally. Instead, it writes it into the database and uses from there.

Downloading a new translation takes no time. In a couple of seconds, you’ll have a newly localized site. When WordPress updates, the plugin will look for the updated translation and offer you to update that too.

Translations for plugins and themes

WordPress Language only gets you translation for WordPress core itself. We hope that in the future, translations for themes and plugins will be available from a central repository. When that happens, we’ll add the support for them as well.

For now, you’ll get the translation for WordPress core. Usually, translated themes and plugins already ship with their translations (like WPML does).

Do I need to run it if I use WPML?

WordPress Language is intended for single-language sites. It cannot run together with WPML (which includes that functionality). If you activate it and WPML together, WordPress Language will auto-disable itself.

Download

In case you missed the link at the top of this post, here it is again:

Questions? Suggestions? Ideas?

Let us know what you think? Do you find this useful? Anything else you’d like to see WordPress Language do?

Leave your comments here!