Code Styling Project

I was searching for a good solution to provide content also for Mobile Devices without any changes to content. I found the WPTouch at the WordPress repository and checked it.
Beside the functional check I also tested the localization aspects and it turns out, that this GPL version is intentionally crippled for translations!

Hard words you would think, but I will show you why directing to the Pro Version with costs is only a bad alibi and can’t stand a proof.

How did this all start?

I wrote a first comment entry related to this plugin at the wordpress.org repository to explain the problem and proposed a solution too. This was more or less a week ago. Any other report appeared after my report gots answered and resulted more or less as fix with the today uploaded version 1.9.18 at repository.
Only my entry has been skipped carefully without any comment from one of the autors.

How did it continue?

Ok, I did the update and was hoping my proposal was silently integrated. After the new check I did today, the situation remains still unchanged. So I wrote the second remark at the forum and linked it to the plugin again.

What happend now?

I got immediately response to my second entry! Let make a quote here or read yourself at wp.org forum thread at the original thread:

“WPtouch Pro is fully localized, ships with a variety of languages, and supports custom language files.

Our efforts are focused on it, not the free version. If you’d like to make a contribution to the work, send the patched files to help@wptouch.com and we’ll include them in the next release.”

What’s that? They are really telling me, the Pro version is fully translated and they have no time to do it at the free GPL based version? I shall contribute for a single line of code they intentionally stripped from code to “focus on Pro Version“?

Let’s proof the 1.9.18 code base now…

A first look of the code base shows, that almost everything has been already prepared to be translatable! They use massively the WP provided gettext functions and also did carefully choose their own textdomain “wptouch“! The only thing, they didn’t do was adding 1 line of code to load a translation file:

1

load_plugin_textdomain('wptouch', false, 'wptouch');

I did add this line to the plugin and afterwards tried to scan it with my plugin Codestyling Localization. After scanning the plugin it turns out, that there are more texts translated as expected:

• Textdomain: “wptouch” with 274 translatable strings
• Textdomain: “wptouch-pro” with 1 translatable string
• Textdomain: “wordtwit” with 1 translatable string
• Textdomain: “default” with 7 translatable strings

Summarize: They have already 282 strings in total translatable inside the plugin! This is mostly the complete backend translation and also a few strings for frontend processing. To show you this for sure I made a screenshot from my edit screen:

What should this tell us?

In my opinion the loading of a translation file has intentionally been skipped to bridge the users out of the GPL version to the paid Pro version. They tell us, that the Pro version is fully translated but the free version is it too! Moreover they want a contribution for a 1 line code which should have been there for sure. I swear the Pro version has this loading call!

Using the WordPress platform is a good thing to become popular. But to cripple already working code to give advantage to Pro versions with just skipping one line code is not the way to deal with the community. I wouldn’t have said anything, if the code wouldn’t have supported translation (all hard-coded). But in this case it is very bad behavoir, that’s my opinion.

Additional Notice - 28.08.2010: I found this blog article at BraveNewCode: 5 Languages On Board, WPtouch 1.8 known issues This shows clearly, that since versions 1.18.x dated first at march 2009 the plugin is translatable but has been crippled to prevent localization at free version.