I always keep my words, since I am a gentle man , and most importantly, F1 Monaco finished for a long time :-p

This post is about a plugin of wordpress, which is the best blogging system of the world. And I have composed a static page for this plugin: http://www.imluke.net/ideas/mlpost.htm. That should be where you find the usage/download/install instruction of my plugin.

And in this post, I just want to have a brief explanation of the making of this plugin. If you are still interested, read on please.

It was 1 year ago when I started this journey: A little bit forward. I lurked around to look for a simple and extendable blog system before that. One day I clicked a button on my dreamhost CP occasionally and the blog was there. I tried and found that it’s good enough for me, and I was happy with the fully customizable theme. After that I made some plans to modify my blog.

After some bad attempts, I managed to write this plugin to add a language meta to a post. From the functionality aspect, it’s really simple: add a meta to a post. But for me, it’s my first plugin, thus it’s complicated. It contains 7 PHP functions, 6 wp action hooks and lots of remarks. It even selects and stores data to database… What a magic!:-)

Oooooooook, Is it useful? The answer is “Yes” for someone. After your post have a language tag, it will have a language attribute (lang=”XXXX” xml:lang=”XXXX”) in its surrounding HTML tag which is presented to the visitors browser. Although the visitor can’t see any difference in most of the case, it do helps the browser to present your article properly. … Check W3C’s explanation if you don’t know what I am talking about.

I want to do more with this language tag in the future. See, filter posts by language, add translation to a post. You can see in the end of this post there is and background tells you it’s written in English. It is a CSS trick that takes advantage of language attribute.

div.post[lang="en"] {
	background: url(../../../plugins/Multilingual/images/post-en.gif) bottom right no-repeat;
}

What’s next? For me, I am still waiting for WP’s approval to get this plugin listed on Wordpress official plugin list, although it seems to be failed until now. I will still work on this anyway to get it really useful. For you, my friend, please leave a comment to tell me what you think about this. I need your support to get it forward.

Ooooooooooops! Quite a long article…