Parsing WordPress translations in Twig/Timber templates has always been quirky and not very convenient. Especially since WordPress started grabbing translations from multiple sources (theme stylesheet, {block,theme}.json, block editor JS, PHP files) and now also outputing in multiple formats (po, php).
WP-CLI being the recommended way to create/update POT files, timber/wp-i18n-twig
provides (almost native) Twig translation extraction by overriding the default wp i18n make-pot
.
Because WP-CLI default commands are not meant to be overridden, there are two working ways to install timber/wp-i18n-twig
:
If you want to use it with a global installed wp
(/usr/local/bin/wp
or similar), you have to install it as a WP-CLI package:
wp package install timber/wp-i18n-twig
You can also install the package at the project level using composer and run WP-CLI from the local vendor/bin/wp
:
composer require timber/wp-i18n-twig
Usage is the same than wp i18n make-pot
command.
wp i18n make-pot /path/to/my/theme languages/my-theme.pot
--debug
flag is handy if you want to check the templates that have been parsed (and watch for parsing errors):
wp i18n make-pot /path/to/my/theme languages/my-theme.pot --debug
Please refer to the wp i18n
command documentation for more detailed information.
To match wp i18n make-pot
behavior, a --skip-twig
flag has been added in case skipping Twig files extraction is needed.
timber/wp-i18n-twig
handles the same translations functions and feature scope wp i18n
does.
It does also support translators comments, at an evil cost.
Adding translators comments in your Twig templates works like it would in PHP, place it on the same line or the line before the translation string:
{# translators: Translators 1! #}
{{ __( 'hello world', 'foo-theme' ) }}
{# Translators: Translators 2! #}
{{ __( 'foo', 'foo-theme' ) }}
{# translators: this should get extracted. #} {{ __( 'baba', 'foo-theme' ) }}
{# translators: boo #} {# translators: this should get extracted too. #} {# some other comment #} {{__( 'bubu', 'foo-theme' ) }}
When working with Twig, you may require popular Twig libraries that register custom tags (such as {% dump %}
, {% cache %}
, etc.). timber/wp-i18n-twig
will automatically load the token parsers for the following tags:
- Tags from symfony/twig-brigde:
{% dump %}
{% form_theme %}
{% stopwatch %}
{% trans_default_domain %}
{% trans %}
- Tags from twigphp/cache-extra:
{% cache %}
- Tags from symfony/ux
{% component %}
{% props %}
Important
For the token parsers to be loaded, you must use the local version of timber/wp-i18n-twig
(vendor/bin/wp
).
To make this package work in any Twig environment, templates are not compiled to PHP but only parsed. This main benefit is that it's (almost) configuration agnostic (custom filters, functions, template location).
However, since Twig is highly configurable, there are still some (minor) limitations.
- Custom tags other than the supported ones above will result in parsing errors.
- Using non default block/comment/variable tags isn't supported and probably won't ever be.