+1
Also count:
* Standalone forums
* Group hierarchy, @firetag was into something.
using po-edit makes it relatively easy and also the edit group slug plug-in. Also I think in most cases you would still have to change the wording ( “someone created the group soccer” to “someone created the sport soccer” would still need to be changed..) , having to use find and replace anyway.
Language file should be used for translations not changing the actual wording on a site. po-edit does not make it easy. It takes me about 2-3 hours to change the title group to something else and I’ve had to do this 3 times now. You can’t simply do a find replace all you have to go through each and every one manually and this word is used a bunch of times. I tried find and replace all and then the site broke.
Instead of making a lang file you could hook into nav item creation, then alter the group items to be labeled how you want. That’s what I do in some instances 
@wpsec can you provide any example ?
@wpsec That wont work because the word groups is spread over the site. Your suggestion would only change the nav title. You would want every last instance of the word group to be something else.
@el_terko Scheduled for a pre beta release tomurrow. Has all the basic features for a groups hierarchy. And for standalone forums I plan to add in a feature like this in future versions too. Anyway @modemlooper this does sound like something I need for a future version for one of my sites. I’ll defiantly do some looking around and try to whip something up. I’ll post back here if I find anything.
I have just had a request that ‘Group’ be changed to ‘Channels’ for an upcoming job, I immediately thought of this thread and *sighed* and yes I fail to see how po files are the right way of dealing with this sort of thing other than at least you are simply trawling through one file.
It would be impossible to make words like “Group” into an admin-configurable option on a text-heavy software like BuddyPress. In English, we might be able to get away with creating a singular replacement and a plural replacement, but not all languages work this way. In Russian, for example, a word might be in a different form depending on which grammatical part of the sentence it is. For this reason, a simple variable substitution for a widely-used word like ‘group’ can’t work. It has to be on a sentence level, which is essentially what the .pot method provides.
I sympathize with those who have a hard time getting Poedit up and running – I don’t find it that easy to use myself. But I disagree that a language file is the wrong way to solve the problem. To me it seems like exactly the right, and only, way.
There shouldn’t really be any issue with getting poEdit running should there? I found it a fairly straightforward programme however the issue of finding and replacing so many instances of a given word is simply irksome I really have better things to be doing and bugger all time to be doing them in! The time I did have cause to try out poEdit to change the word ‘favorite’ to the correct spelling took longer than I cared to spend on something of that nature, What I didn’t establish is the find and replace capabilities, which I’m goin to try in a mnute.
Maybe a option would be to have optional “po templates” for groups with a phrase/sentence that might suit a type of site better than others? and then have the word “group” optional?
just thought of this as well, could it not call the word “group” from the slug, ( edit group slug plug-in comes in here ) and then change it according to each sentence, like capitalize the 1st letter and strip of “s” and so on. Would be alot of work but ye..
@nit3watch That’s an interesting idea about .po/.mo templates. Maybe in the future, if BP starts shipping with more than one default theme, it could also ship with more than one such default template, just to give people a sense of how you might make BP act differently.
The slug idea might be workable (though awfully messy) for English, but it simply couldn’t work more generally.
Ok @boonebgorges , I’m new to po files. Why are the strings in the language file not in order. Anything related to groups is all over the file. Could they be made in a way that anything with group be placed together?
@modemlooper I’m not sure how .po files are generated. I assume the po-making program just runs through all the files in a directory in alphabetical order and finds strings like that, which would explain why they can be all over the place. Is it true that Poedit doesn’t have a useful search-and-replace? How about just opening the .po file in a plain-text editor, doing a search and replace there, and using Poedit to turn it into a .mo file?
The main problem is you can’t do find and replace all. It breaks the file. You have to hit next over and over and search manually. Very time consuming when you want to just change one word.
A reason I’m wanting an easier fix is for theming. Say you are developing a theme for sports teams. You would want the user of that theme to change groups to teams. They are not going to edit a po file. ‘Groups’ in my opinion is too generic anymore for social networks. The network is the ‘group’. Unless you are trying to do a facebook type site then ‘groups’ will work but for niche sites it’s too generic.
I agree it’s generic but I just don’t see a programmatic way to allow easier editing of that information. Languages are too different from each other. Even making it work right for English would be an enormous task.
For what it’s worth, I just happen to be editing a po file right now for a project I’m doing (literally right now – poedit is open on my desktop) and I don’t find it so bad to use. To go through and change all instances of ‘group’ might take ten or fifteen minutes. This is a pretty small investment IMO to essentially change large amounts of text throughout the program.
I edited my first po file so that I could change the groups name. 147 line edits later and I’m done. Luckily it’s a one time per site thing or it would be a REALLY major pain.
It seems to me that the po and mo files could be used on any site once they’re generated. So, why not create a repository or list of mo/po files that just change the groups to some other name?
After failing for an hour I guess it’s time I broke down and asked:
what am I doing wrong here? I’ve made changes with Poedit, I’ve uploaded the .mo and .po files to /wp-content/languages and I’ve even tried defining the language in wp-config.php.
Nothing I do gets my new phrasing to show up on the live site. Any ideas? What am I missing?
+1
Have to replace “Groups” with “Circles”
and “Friends” with “Contacts”
