After battling it out with the language files on my wife’s blog for about 3 hours I was finally able to get  Buddypress and BBPress working in Spanish. Trust me it isn’t as straight forward as you might think and all the tuts out there always seem to miss something or they aren’t valid for the current releases.

So I felt it my duty to put together some tips in case someone needs to add another language to their site and here they are!

First, lets get the important stuff out of they way. What version of WP, BP, and BBp are used for this tutorial:

WordPress 3.4.1

Buddypress 1.5.7

BBpress 2.1.2

Lets get us some language files!

You’ll need to head over to: http://translate.wordpress.org/projects/bbpress/plugin

select your language and download the .po and .mo, although you really only need the .mo file. You should end up with something like this – bbpress-plugin-es.mo but with your language choice of course.

Now for the fun stuff. Your are going to need to upload this file, by whatever means you use regularly, into the following directory:

/wp-content/languages/bbpress

If you don’t have the last directory created then you’ll need to create it.

Next, you need to change the name of the file to something like this: bbpress-es_ES.mo where you insert your language in place of the es_ES.

And finally, you’ll need to add a line to your wp-config.php file as follows: define(‘BBLANG’, ‘es_ES’);where you replace es_ES with your language, look for this line in your config file “define ('WPLANG', '');” and paste it just below it.

And that’s it!

Drop me a line and let me know how it goes!