I18N Command Laravel Package

Product Decisions This Supports

• Localization roadmap: ship multilingual or not. wp i18n make-pot turns "we should localize eventually" into an estimable, repeatable build step — string extraction stops being a research spike and becomes a CI job.
• Build vs. buy for the translation pipeline. This replaces a homegrown string-scraping script or a paid extraction step in a TMS. MIT-licensed, maintained under the WP-CLI org, and already the de facto convention in WordPress plugin CI.
• Distribution strategy. If the plugin ships on wordpress.org, a valid .pot is effectively table stakes for translation eligibility. This package makes that compliance nearly free, which tips distribution decisions toward the marketplace.
• Feature scoping for modern editor UI. make-json tells you whether a block-editor/React front end can be localized through the same pipeline as the PHP side. That materially changes the cost estimate for any block-based feature on the roadmap.
• Release engineering policy. Generated PO/MO/JSON committed to the repo versus built per-release is a process decision this tool makes cheap to test and trivial to reverse.
• Contractor and ecosystem leverage. Adopting WP-CLI conventions lowers onboarding cost for WordPress-familiar contributors and agencies, since the commands are already familiar.

When to Consider This Package

Adopt when:

• You build or maintain WordPress plugins/themes and want .pot/.po/.mo/.json generation without bespoke scripts.
• Your CI already runs WP-CLI, or you can add a PHP-based build step.
• You have mixed PHP + JS strings (block editor, React admin UI) and need consistent handling across both.
• You want MIT-licensed, no-lock-in tooling that you can pin and drop later.

Look elsewhere when:

• The product is Laravel or framework-agnostic PHP. Laravel has its own lang/ conventions, __()/@lang helpers, and php artisan lang:publish. A WordPress-specific extractor is a category mismatch here — use Laravel's translation tooling or a general gettext/PHP-parser extractor instead. This package is WordPress tooling, not a general PHP i18n library.
• You need translation management — review workflows, translator portals, machine translation, or TMS integrations. This only extracts and compiles; it does not translate.
• You need JS-only extraction outside a WordPress context (use i18next-parser or FormatJS).
• Your stack isn't PHP/WordPress, or your CI cannot run PHP.
• You require vendor SLAs or long-term commercial support — this is a small community project with no commercial backing.

Signals to weigh: 122 stars and unknown repository metadata are modest confidence indicators; verify release cadence and pin a version. Blast radius is low — it's a build-time dev dependency, not runtime code shipped to customers.

How to Pitch It (Stakeholders)

Executives: This is a free, MIT-licensed developer utility that removes the largest hidden cost of shipping a multilingual WordPress product — manually tracking which strings are translatable. It runs at build time, adds no runtime dependency to what we ship, and emits the standard .pot/.po/.mo formats that every translation vendor and wordpress.org already accept. Cost is near zero; the payoff is that localization becomes a repeatable CI step and a plannable line item rather than an open-ended project. Risk is contained: it lives in the build pipeline, we pin the release, and removing it later is a one-line change.

Engineering: Four commands — make-pot, make-json, make-mo, update-po — replace ad-hoc string-grep scripts and manual catalog maintenance. Wire make-pot/make-json into the build, decide whether artifacts are committed or published per release, and pin the version. Note the scope boundary clearly: this is WordPress tooling; any Laravel services in our portfolio should use Laravel's native translation system rather than this package.