WordPress is a great blogging platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability. However, as Nikolay Bachiyski pointed out on the GSoC2007 WordPress blog (http://codex.wordpress.org/GSoC2007), “there are a number of challenges both the WordPress i18n infrastructure and the WordPress l10n community are facing”.
As an active developer at a Chinese blog hosting site (http://72pines.com/) based on WordPress MU, I believe the improvements in the WordPress core codebase for better handling of internationalization/localization issues would be crucial for attracting more and more WordPress users across the globe. I, together with other developers at 72pines.com, are very excited about the ideas of bringing WordPress to more people in China. After all, China has a population of 1,300,000,000, and more and more people are choosing blog as an easy way to publish thoughts and ideas on the internet.
While a good localization package like the simplified-Chinese package I’m working on can be a good starting point, it is far from perfect. Many things can be done in the WordPress codebase, and the solutions to these issues will not only be beneficial to the huge Chinese blogger community, but also be useful to all blog communities with a native language other than English. Continue reading