Reduce plugin size – download only needed languages

  • Resolved Daedalon

    (@daedalon)


    10 years, 3 months ago

    While going through different culprits for why our backups have grown so large, we found that for many plugins more than half the size they took was for languages we never used. I’ve put this suggestion forward in http://wordpress.org/support/topic/reduce-plugin-size-download-only-needed-languages for another plugin, and since this is also one of the best-maintained ones, I thought I’d put this forward here too:

    Could you make it so that the plugin downloads only those languages that are needed?

    You could probably host them at wordpress.org, perhaps on the Trac. An additional benefit to the disk space and bandwidth savings are that the languages can be updated independently of the plugin.

    Benefit in numbers

    Folder wp-slimstat takes 4.72 MB.
    The files wp-slimstat/wp-slimstat-??_??.?o take 1.98 MB, 42% of the plugin size.
    This waste percentage will increase as new languages are added.

    Hopefully you can consider this, Camu. Upon your finding a solution, I would be happy to link that for other plugin developers to use as an example.

    http://wordpress.org/plugins/wp-slimstat/

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
  • Plugin Author Jason Crouse

    (@coolmann)

    10 years, 3 months ago

    Hi Daedalon,

    you bring up a very good point, indeed. Language Files and screenshots should not be part of the plugin, we’ve always been very vocal in the WordPress community about this. When you download a plugin, you should be able to select your language, and the system should create a zip on-the-fly that only includes what you REALLY need to run that plugin. After all, this is how they do it for WP core.

    Unfortunately our requests have fallen on deaf ears. You may want to post a message on the wp-hackers mailing list. If more and more people start asking for something like this, maybe they will listen to us 😉

    Yes, we could hack together a half-baked solution, but it would still be cumbersome for the average user, since it would involve connecting to our servers and downloading the language files separately.

    Cheers,
    Camu

    Thread Starter Daedalon

    (@daedalon)

    10 years, 3 months ago

    Thank you Camu for the fast reply! This is how I envisioned it to work:

    1. User installs and activates the plugin. Default installation comes in English.
    2. Upon activation, the plugin checks if language files for user’s own language exist in wp-content/languages/pluginname/. If not, it downloads them, and only them.
    3. Plugin checks for updated language files once in 24 hours, or if possible, makes the WP core language file check do this.

    I don’t know the WordPress SVN / Trac inside out, but I would guess there would be a way to use them for hosting the files without any additional work from wordpress.org maintainers. What do you think?

    Plugin Author Jason Crouse

    (@coolmann)

    10 years, 3 months ago

    Again, this should be something standardized for plugins, not a hacked solution put together by some developers who proactively do this. I will be happy to implement whatever solution is available, as long as it comes from WordPress and applies to ALL plugins as a standard framework.

    Best,
    Camu

    Thread Starter Daedalon

    (@daedalon)

    10 years, 3 months ago

    Submitted core ticket #26773 to request this.

    Plugin Author Jason Crouse

    (@coolmann)

    10 years, 3 months ago

    Added myself to the ticket so that I can follow the discussion 😉 Thank you for doing this!

    Plugin Author Jason Crouse

    (@coolmann)

    10 years, 3 months ago

    It looks like it might take a while for WordPress to complete their part to make this happen.

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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