Locales

Pick a locale in the topbar or set a default in Settings. Names, addresses, phone numbers, postcodes and company names all follow it.

The picker is searchable by name or by code, and the code is shown beside each one because that is what the REST API, WP-CLI and the MCP tools take.

One list, and why that matters

Platforms\Locale is the only locale list in the plugin. PHP reads it there; TypeScript reads the codes the server inlines.

A second list is how the admin came to offer 73 locales while the REST enum accepted 6. Worse, FakerPHP’s Factory::create() falls back to en_US in silence, so the other 67 produced English with no error anywhere — a picker that appeared to work and did nothing.

Adding a locale means FakerPHP ships a provider for it. A test fails if the two disagree, which is what keeps the promise honest rather than aspirational.

What changes with the locale

	Follows the locale	Example, de_DE
Names	✅ FakerPHP	Katharina Brandt
Street addresses	✅ FakerPHP	Lindenstraße 47
Cities and states	✅ FakerPHP	München, Bayern
Postcodes	✅ FakerPHP	80331
Phone numbers	✅ FakerPHP	+49 89 1234567
Company names	✅ FakerPHP	Brandt GmbH
Product names	⚠️ vocabulary, if shipped	falls back to English
Category names	⚠️ vocabulary, if shipped	falls back to English

Vocabulary falls back, and says so

Locale affects two different things, and they degrade differently.

FakerPHP data — names, addresses, phone formats — is per-locale and always local.

Vocabulary — product nouns, category names, brand stems — is shipped per locale and may not exist for yours. When it does not, it falls back to en_US.

flowchart LR
  A[Run in de_DE] --> B{Recipe ships de_DE?}
  B -- yes --> C[German product names]
  B -- no --> D[English product names]
  A --> E[FakerPHP]
  E --> F[German names, addresses,<br/>phone numbers either way]
  D -.->|card says so<br/>before the run| G[Product names stay en_US]

That fallback used to be silent, and it was the same bug in a different place: 72 of the 73 offered locales generated “Widget” and “Gadget” from each generator’s inline defaults, with a WP_DEBUG_LOG line as the only sign.

Now the fallback is announced. A recipe that ships no vocabulary for your locale says so on its card, before the run rather than after it.

Translating a recipe

Add a directory and a line — no plugin change, no release:

grocery/products/de_DE/product_names.json
grocery/product_categories/de_DE/departments.json

Then list de_DE in that recipe’s recipe.json and regenerate the archive index. The card’s warning disappears for German.