Design Guide for Plugin Developers

[bonienl]

With the introduction of multi-language support in Unraid 6.9, there is a possibility for plugin developers to make their plugins multi-language ready too.

 

First, it is not mandatory for any plugin to support multi-language. Existing plugins will keep on working as before in Unraid 6.9. Without modifications though, these plugins will display any text as is programmed in the plugin (English).

 

When multi-language support is added to an existing plugin, as a developer you have to make a choice:

1. Multi-language support is added, and the plugin can only run on Unraid 6.9 or higher (less work)
2. Multi-language support is added, and is used when running on Unraid 6.9 or higher, while running on older Unraid versions lets the plugin fall back to English

 

Obviously adding both multi-language support and legacy support requires more effort, but has the benefit that users can keep using the plugin when running an older Unraid version.

 

Besides making the plugin multi-language ready, the plugin developer needs to create the necessary language translation files with the English source text and make them available on Github in a folder representing the plugin. This will allow others to copy these files to a different language repo and make translations to their language.

 

The attached Design Guide describes the steps to make a plugin multi-language ready and the additional steps for legacy support.

Please go through this guide carefully. Several plugins are already made multi-language ready and studying those may help in making your plugins ready.

 

Experience so far has shown that it takes a while to understand how multi-language works and what is needed to do it "right", but don't get discouraged when things don't work at first!

 

Design guide - multi-language support.pdf

 

Edited June 24, 2020 by bonienl

[Squid]

5 hours ago, bonienl said:

Several plugins are already made multi-language ready and studying those may help in making your plugins ready

If anyone is studying existing plugins, they should study the dynamix series of plugins, and not CA (or associated CA plugins).  CA etc were programmed prior to the "official" backwards compatibility model and while similar use a different method of maintaining backwards compatibility.