If you are multi-language IT Pro you may want to show articles in multiple languages just like me. I use Polylang in my blog to switch English and Chinese version. I used to add “Language Switcher” tag in my articles. It’s manual process that I had to remember the tag in somewhere, copy and past it to articles when I was writing. It’s frustration to repeat it in every article. Another problem was I have to add “Read More” tag in each article before I add “Language Switcher” tag. That’s because each post shows a switcher in home page if I don’t do that. It confuses Polylang which URL each article should goes. I want to find a perfect way to fix this problem! Here we go…
To show switcher in each article page but not home page, I need to figure out a way to call the plugin in article template. The template is “content-single.php“. It won’t work if you put tag directly in template file. Thanks WordPress published a function “the_widget()“. It calls plugin according to input parameters. There are 3 input parameters in the function: $widget, $instance and $args.
$widget is PHP class name of the plugin. I went through all codes of Polylang and eventually found the PHP class name was “PLL_Widget_Languages“. I found it in “polylang/include/widget-languages.php“. I also wanted to hidden current language in article. There is a option “Hides the current language” in the plugin admin page. But it’s not a global setting. I have to figure out which variable it is and pass it to the_widget() function. According to the code, it’s “the_widget( ‘PLL_Widget_Languages’,’hide_current=1′ )”. It’s part of $instance. The last parameter $args is something contains HTML code. I leave it default.
Summarize it, you just need add the_widget( ‘PLL_Widget_Languages’,’hide_current=1′ ) somewhere in content-single.php. 🙂