Language Issue

Sorry about the very long delay in replying to this. I’m not quite sure how to approach this one, to be honest. Curious if you’ve made any headway since, or if you still need some guidance on best path forward.

Hi Michael,

Thanks for replying!

I am developing the website and ignored it for the type being, but I really hope there is someway this could work.

Do you think it’s possible to force the plugin to use english letters for the coding stuff perhaps based on the slug?

Thanks!

Well, just so we can be clear, where are you inputting the text that’s causing it to break? Which input fields?

The Achievement types ones. Basically, I was trying to get an achievement type and used Arabic letters. I tried defining an English slug but it’s probably not using the slug.

I guess one approach could be to create them in English but then user filters or translation files somehow to output the Arabic words for the achievement titles?

Thanks a lot for helping with this!

The Filter/translation files may be your best bet at the moment.

The issue really is determining which fields get used to create aspects related to the url and achievement slug, and if it’s always an isolated field. I *think* there may be some spots that are treated as fallback values if another isn’t specified

Will hopefully try that. Care (please!) to give me a few tips before I try this lol. I am no coder :).

Thanks!

For which parts? the filters and translation?

Yes please, is there a simple filter that I could use within functions.php to replace the achievement types names in the front-end which I could then add as needed for all types text to be replaced?

Otherwise, how do you suggest I go through the translation route?

Thanks!

Hello again, we’re looking into how to easily get around this. It’s a bit of a missed design consideration with how we register the post types, and I want to do what we can to make it so all languages can register their achievements properly and successfully. Thank you for your patience here.

Could you share some example Arabic text that you’ve been using so that we can test a few things on our end for this? Also which screen you’re using these on, just so that we can be sure to be testing in the right area.

Hi Michael,

Thanks for getting back to me and for helping resolve the issue and making the plugin work with other languages.

To answer your question, I tried using an Arabic name for the achievement type, this resulted in the following problems for me:

• Inability to define steps per badge as when I click on the button to define the step nothing happens.
• When I click view to view the badge, I get an 404 error page.

I’ve tried to use another achievement type which I used English to create, I was able to view the badge page in the front-end and was able to define steps.

Back to the achievement type I created in Arabic, I was trying to use the word ????? as the title and a similar word as the plural form ???????. This caused the URL structure for this particular achievement type to look strange. You can see this pictures to get an idea of what I meant:

Arabic Name used for achievement type and achievement post. You can see the link looks strange and very long.

English Name used for achievement type but Arabic for post, but English for slug to be safe (all working).

I hope I was of little help to provide the information that might. I guess one possible solution would be to offer a way to define the slug that would be used for the URL structure and have that defined as part of the achievement type creation rather than having it auto-generated from the achievement type title.

I am happy to help provide further information or test possible solutions.

Some notes for you to hopefully help you understand how these are processed while we try to find a preventive way to solve this for all languages.

Each “achievement” you register are posts in a post type that the plugin registers itself. When it comes time, we loop through all of the achievement types made, and create post types for those. Post type used to create post types.

It’ll grab the post title for the achievement, and set some hidden meta fields name _badgeos_singular_name and _badgeos_plural_name. If the singular name saved already doesn’t match the post title, it’ll update that to match. If there isn’t a plural form saved already, it’ll save the same value, otherwise not touch the plural.

After that, it’ll pull the values saved in those two meta fields, and continue on to registering the post types. It’s at that point that the singular value is run through the following:

sanitize_title( substr( strtolower( $achievement_name_singular ), 0, 20 ) )

Working from inside out: strtolower will make all of the characters lowercase, substr will trim the value to 20 characters, as that’s the max allowed for post type slugs, and then it runs the value through sanitize_title(). That will make the text “WordPress slug ready” aka clean up parts of it, replace spaces with -‘s or _’s and so on.

I have to wonder if there’s something going on within that, specifically the sanitize_title() part and perhaps some character encoding. However, we’ll be trying to find the permanent solution over here, with the information you provided above.

Hi Michael,

Thanks for your response! I too think that the issue is cause by the sanitize_title().

I look forward to any solutions you propose :). Please let me know if you want me to test anything.

Many thanks!

Good day Ala7lam.

It’s been awhile, but I have not forgotten. I also don’t have a BadgeOS level solution or any fix that will be getting submitted to the code.

However, I’ve been googling around about how to get around this issue. It’d need to be tested and made sure it’s working right. I have been comparing content I enter within the WP Admin to what actually gets saved to the database, and it looks like the *only* problem areas are the post_name and post_slug fields for this. So my thoughts were to see if you could have a working achievements set in Arabic, but without the post type in the urls. I have provided a url to a tutorial that does a lot of that, but will need to be edited a bit to fit your particular setup. If it doesn’t work, perhaps someone else has done up a tutorial that does. The idea is the key part, removing the slug from the urls for the achievement types.

https://ryansechrest.com/2013/04/remove-post-type-slug-in-custom-post-type-url-and-move-subpages-to-website-root-in-wordpress/

Let me know your thoughts on this or if you’ve had any change of luck with it since we last talked.