Add support for custom translation keys

[michaelw85]

Feature Request

• Yes, I reviewed the contribution guidelines.

Describe your use case and the problem you are facing

When using a custom templating engine like Laravel blade or twig it can be interesting to create your own translation function or even just a custom function in WP. I use blade and created a directive @t() the wraps __() and adds a bit more functionality like a default text domain and string interpolation. As expected, these custom keys/functions are not included in the resulting pot file.

Describe the solution you'd like

I would love to add an optional argument allowing custom keys/functions to be included in the resulting pot.
For example the -k flag available in the xgettext command.

[michaelw85]

I have time to contribute this friday and would like to see if this is something I could add unless this ticket is rejected.

[swissspidy]

Blade is currently supported by default, but of course only with the default __() functions. Twig has come up before, see #52.

I don't see us adding something like the --keyword argument in xgettext, as it would add a lot of extra complexity and wouldn't even be able to handle anything custom like you describe it.

I'd suggest looking into extending the base functionality using your own package, similar to how https://github.com/timber/wp-i18n-twig does it. Then you can implement all sorts of extra logic for your custom directives.

[michaelw85]

Blade is currently supported by default, but of course only with the default __() functions. Twig has come up before, see #52.

I don't see us adding something like the --keyword argument in xgettext, as it would add a lot of extra complexity and wouldn't even be able to handle anything custom like you describe it.

I'd suggest looking into extending the base functionality using your own package, similar to how https://github.com/timber/wp-i18n-twig does it. Then you can implement all sorts of extra logic for your custom directives.

Thanks for the feedback, adding my own plugin/package was something I was thinking about but since I started contributing I wanted to check if it could be a core feature.

FYI, I only added -kt to my xgettext command to make it pickup my directive @t('key'). Only downside of my current setup is that I forced xgettext into python language to support blade files. I want to switch to wp cli to generate the pot files.