I was thinking about translating my themes to other languages, so that I started to search for some information. And I found it’s not that easy as I imagined. Some details need to be concerned.

I thought maybe I can write a tutorial for this, but later I decided it’s not necessary to reinvent the wheel. Here I will introduce you for some great tutorials on WordPress Themes Translation, wish may help you.

1. http://codex.wordpress.org/Translating_WordPress
   Official translating tutorial from WordPress.org codex, most of the concepts you need to know was introduced. But this is not just for translating themes, but about the whole WordPress translating. If you are new to this topic, this should be your first post.
2. Localizing WordPress Themes & Plugins
   This is a great and detailed tutorial on how to make your themes and plugins translatable.
3. Translating WordPress Plugins & Themes
   From the same author as the second tut, while the above one is about making your themes and plugins translatable, this tut is talking about translating themes and plugins in practice with poEdit and GNU Gettext.
4. Make Your WordPress Theme Ready For Translation
   This is a tutorial I wrote before, as you can see in the title, it’s about making your theme translatable.
5. My Tutorials on Translating WordPress Theme (Chinese)
   As there are not enough Chinese tutorials on translating WrodPress themes, I translated and wrote  this series of translating tuts according to above 3 tuts.

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Twitter is testing a new feature on 1 percent of users, it’s called Local Trends. Local trends helps you to find out trends around the location you selected, it only supports 15 U.S. cities. If the testing goes well, local trends will be released to the public next week.

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I guess you’ve already heard about what happen to Haiti, I was shocked by those news photos and videos of the earthquake, and I’ve read a report which is claiming that Haiti is no longer existed.

Can you imagine if this is happening in your city or contry?

Can we bloggers do something to help people in Haiti? Here is a list of organizations involved in the relief of Haiti.

• American Red Cross
• CARE
• Catholic Relief Services
• International Medical Corp
• International Rescue Committee
• Mercy Corps
• Oxfam America
• Partners in Health
• Save the Children
• UNICEF
• World Food Programme

You may find what you can do to help via these organizations, I guess letting more people know about these organizations may do a little favor, too.

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If you want your WordPress themes to be used by more people, you can translate them to other languages, or ask your theme user to do this for you. But first of all, you need to make your theme texts translatable.

To do this, you need know how WordPress  do the translation. WordPress uses GNU gettext for localization. With this framework, you can mark your theme texts for translation. You can use the following two ways to mark texts.

1. __($text) : this means $text need to be translated, and returns the result.
2. _e($text) : this means $text need to be translated, and prints out the result to the webpage, equal to echo __($text).

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I just added a Free Job Board to ZackLive.com, I need a logo for it, and I come to Supalogo, which is the coolest Web2.0 style logo generator I found.

It’s very easy to use, just enter the text for the logo, and then click on OPTIONS, you can set the font family, font size, font color and so on. Finally click on GENERATE, you will got your cool web2.0 style logo, you can download it for later use. This is my logo for example.

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WP_Query is a powerful tool to control what to display on your blog. This is very useful for plugin and theme designer, especially for magazine style themes which need to display posts of different categories in different sections. In this post, I will teach you how and when to use WP_Query.

Case 1: Display posts in particular category

In some WordPress themes, we want to show some posts in particular category(e.g. Featured Posts), the easiest way to do this is to use WP_Query. Here is the example code:

< ?php
    $FeaturedPosts = new WP_Query();
    $FeaturedPosts->query('category_name=Featured&showposts=5');
    while($FeaturedPosts->have_posts()) : $FeaturedPosts->the_post();
?>
<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>" rel="bookmark">< ?php the_title(); ?></a></li>

< ?php endwhile; ?>

I defined a variable named $FeaturedPosts and instantiated an instance of WP_Query. I then used a method of WP_Query to start a query to get 5 posts in the category named Featured. The last step is to start the loop to display the post, Here I only showed titles of posts.

Now you understand how WP_Query works, let’s see the next case.
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I’ve been learning PHP and web design for a while, I met my bottleneck and can’t get through it. I tried to read some open source codes, like WordPress, but I can’t understand all the codes. I think that’s because I have no real project experience. I tried to look for some open source project which I can join to help developing the project, and improve my programming skill as well. But I can’t find a suitable project and whether the project members are willing to help is also a question.

That’s why I started the project of Real Project Tutorial(RPT). The goal of RPT is to help new PHPer/Web designer with real open source project. So that they can learn the whole procedure of a real project and gain experience by joining the team. As this is a tutorial project, every members are willing to answer your questions, we also require our codes to be fully commented. The readers can easily understand our codes.

As I’ve mentioned before, I am not a experienced programmer, we are looking for project manager or experienced PHP programmer to help running the project. We will started by a Guestbook project, you can learn the basic concept of PHP and web design. And then we will come to a blogging platform project, like WordPress, here you will learn some advance skills, like MVC pattern, Authentication, and so on. While the blogging platform is developing, we can also think about building a Framework. After the prototype of the framework was established, we can start some branch projects for practice, Forum, common CMS, Twitter-like CMS, for examples. That sounds like a lot of projects, is it too much? Actually we just need to focus on one main project, and let others who are interested in to manage other projects.

Guestbook –> Blog –> Framework –> Forum/CMS/Twitter

If you go through the whole tutorial project, you will become a professional and experienced programmer. This is the project all about, helping new programmer with real open source project.

You are welcomed to join us, feel free to talk to us, every ideas and advices are appreciated. Check out our Real Project Tutorial forum.

After my last post Top 10 Best Quality WordPress Themes Of 2009, we have found more great themes, today we are sharing some portfolio WordPress themes with you.

1. Irresistable

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@mikebithell

Twitter is a very powerful tool, so many people are using Twitter, and more and more great Twitter themes being created. We found some great illustrated style Twitter design which may inspire you. Feel free to let us know you found better ones. (You can find me here on Twitter)

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A lot of great WordPress themes were created in 2009, we collect top 10 high quality WordPress themes, please let me know if you got better ones.

Gallery

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