Translating and Changing Text in the Zippy Courses Plugin
This guide provides an overview of how to translate the Zippy Courses plugin. For a more broad guide on how to translate a WordPress plugin, see this comprehensive tutorial.
Zippy Courses is a fully translation-ready plugin, meaning you can translate the entire plugin into any language. You can also use translation tools to tweak the language and terminology used in the Zippy Courses plugin. Zippy Courses is completely translation-ready, meaning you only need to make a few modifications to make Zippy Courses work with your language.
Translating a WordPress plugin requires a bit more work than a normal Zippy Courses configuration. In order to make translations to your plugin, you will need access to your site via an FTP login, and be comfortable modifying some files in your zippy courses plugin directory. If you’re not sure how to connect to your site via FTP, contact your web host.
You will also need to download and unzip a copy of the Zippy Courses plugin on your local computer to build your translation files. You can find the latest version of the Zippy Courses plugin in your Zippy Courses account at https://zippycourses.com/account/.
To create your own translation, you will need some third-party tools. Several tools exist for creating a translation, but for the purposes of this article we will look at Poedit - which is available on both Windows and Mac, and is free for the tools needed to translate the Zippy Courses plugin.
Once Poedit is installed and running page, select the Create new Translation option. In your Zippy Courses plugin, the template file you need is in the lang/ folder, labeled as zippy-courses.pot.
When you select this file, you will see a list of all of the text in the Zippy Courses plugin. You can then create translations of each of the lines of text in Zippy Courses.
When you have completed these updates, save the translation file using the following pattern:
zippy-courses-en_US
Replacing the en_US code with your site’s language. By default, this is en_US, but if you have a different wordpress language defined in your wp-config file, you would use that language instead.
Tip: Making a translation using the en_US extension is a great way to modify the text of your Zippy Courses site without editing or deleting any plugin files.
Saving these changes will create a .mo and .po file. Then, you can upload your new translation files to your Zippy Courses site.
Uploading your translation files
Using your FTP login, navigate to your plugins directory and go to zippy-courses/lang/, and upload the two language files that were created by Poedit.
Define your WordPress site Language
If you haven’t already, you will also have to declare your site’s WordPress language in your site’s settings.
By default, this will be set to US english (en_US), so if you are translating to a different language, you would use the appropriate Language Code for your translation. You can find a list of language codes here. Here are a few common language codes:
- Spanish: es_ES
- French: fr_FR
- Chinese: zh_CN
After that, go to Settings → General in WordPress, and set your site's language to the same language as your translation file.
Once your translation file is in place and your language is defined, your translation will appear automatically in your WordPress site. Any instances of the pre-translated text will automatically be replaced with your translated text.
Please note that when translating your site, there may be some instances where the same terms you wish to translate in the plugin exist in the theme you're using as well. If those terms don't match, WordPress will choose the theme translation over the plugin translation. If a term you have translated is not correctly displaying for you, follow the same process you did to translate the plugin to translate your theme as well. Once you've done that and uploaded it to your site, you should be all set.