BuddyPress

Hi, is it possible to allow user to choose which language BP should use? I’d like to offer BP in two or more languages…

yeap, me too ))

no information about that but this is a very needed option

It could be a very usefull option, to have that

I think this is an essential request! Instead of adding tons of new features the focus should be on the basic features again; to build a tool that connects people and allows communitation! Everyone who wants to use Buddypress for an international purpose needs multi-language support for the frontend. It would be great to have language filters for the contents like on wordpress.com or facebook.com. If the user prefers swedish instead of english for instance he should only get blog posts/groups and forums in his choosen language. This is definitely one point that should be considered in future development.

Whats your thoughts about this?

I’ve mentioned this before but it went ignored, perhaps nobody was interested at the time? lol

I’m not sure how localization works with BuddyPress, but I’m guessing it just takes the WPLANG constant which can be defined in wp-config.php

There are language switching plugins out there which define this on a per-user basis, perhaps try getting the basic WPLANG definition feature from this ( http://www.poplarware.com/languageplugin.html ) working with WPMU/BuddyPress?

I gave some thoughts to this topic and my conclusion so far is, that it would be the best solution to set up a WPMU + Buddypress System for each language. The only thing that would be needed is a Plugin that shares the Userdata between these systems. A user who signed up on your swedish installation of WPMU + Buddypress should be able to use this account for your english version too and so on.

One could do it as on wordpress.com, where wordpress.com is the main website. If You choose a different language, say german (.de) you get redirected to de.wordpress.com and only german content will appear.

i know i’m a bit late on that topic but i do agree that it should almost be a core feature to be able to switch language file.

I’m not talking about having the content translation feature, but the front/back end stuff, basically anything showing on the localization file.

So a user can decide his default language (among the available ones) for the site.

It only makes sense: MU for WordPress MU, for BuddyPress/WordPress MU, for MUlti users, for MUlti blogs and for MUlti language.

I’ve done some research and could not find a black/white solution. it’s seems to be in the grey zone at the moment.

Has anybody been able to achieve this yet?

cheers

For the backend it’s simply a matter of adding another .mo file to the language folder in /wp-content to get wpmu to be multilingual, the same goes for any other plugins, they each have to have their own .mo file.

There is a great plugin available which makes translating plugins or even the the wpmu core itself easy, and allows you to do it a little at a time. CodeStyling Localization (I am not affiliated with them in the least, but it is more than great). It allows you to do localization for themes, plugins, mu-plugins, and wpmu base code itself, absolutely awesome.

http://www.code-styling.de/english/development/wordpress-plugin-codestyling-localization-en

For the front end and to allow different users of any of the blogs to change the backend easily and quickly I recommend qTranslate.

http://www.qianqin.de/qtranslate/

It is easy to use and easy to setup. Non-technical users will immediately know how to use this once it is setup. The setup may not be for non-technical users on their own, but a simple how-to will easily walk anyone through it. This plugin allows visitors to see multilingual content and change the language on the blog front-end (although I haven’t really used it for multilingual switching for the social networking portion of buddypress, I’ll have to play around and see what it can do).

Each blog can have it’s main language set in the the Settings/General page with the site wide default set in Site Admin/ Options (this is built in to wpmu, it doesn’t need a plugin – it’s been there from before 1.0 if my memory is correct).

I use English and Japanese (which will often not work when the localization is not done right) so I think these are pretty good plugins that work well with wpmu’s built in localization.

thanks jalien for this post, very informative, clear and easy to understand.

qTranslate currently has some problems with WPMU and BuddyPress, so unfortunately this isn’t a turn-key solution quite yet. There are a few changes to BP that are patched in the trac, and many changes to qTranslate that need to happen to make this work the way it should.

We’re likewise interested in this capability. I guess at the very least, everyone has the same basic goal for the functionality — each user of WPMU would be able to define a localization and language. John, what would be the best place to look if people were interested in contributing to testing patches / tracking this development? Ultimately, is it likely some combination like Jalien is suggesting will work, with other changes in the BP/WPMU backend?

do I understand correctly that I do need to have 2 installations of BuddyPress, 2 installations of WPMU and 2 installations of BB-Press in order to run my website in 2 languages ?

Appreciate your advise.

Many thanks,

Erich

I resume this post. My main buddypress installation must be in Italian, but I’d like to create a blog inside which uses english text for international users.
Is it possible?

bump … is there an admin bar language switcher for 1.2?

Please note, the .mo or .po files do not do the complete translation job, e.g. not /wp-reg.php etc.