Question

Are there guidelines or state of the art ways to localize a PHP/MySQL website?

The idea here is to translate buttons, page titles and messages. The language of the website would be chosen at installation time and shouldn’t change.

I have started creating text files containing lists of keywords with their translation, but it feels like reinventing the wheel.

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

In the meantime, I found about an efficient way to build the array text file.

Wherever I want to translate a text item, I use the php gettext() function aliased _() to encapsulate it.

Then, with poedit I parse all my php files an create the translations automatically.

My generated .po (human readable) and .mo (compiled) localization files are put in:

locale/en_EN/LC_MESSAGES

I then initialize my translation application with this code:

$locale = 'en_EN';
putenv("LC_ALL=".$locale);
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);
bindtextdomain("messages", "locale");
textdomain("messages");

PROS:

• This way I do not have to keep track of my various text items and
  creating new translations can be done by non programmers.
• The output .po files also seem to be quite standard in their format.
• The .po files also reference every occurrence of the text to translate in my project.
• Another good thing is that if for some reason the .po translation files cannot be accessed, the basic text will be displayed by the gettext function.