Question

I’ve developed a website more than a year ago. The content were/is in two languages and now I need to build a database driven update/data insertion system for them to inserte some news, events etc.
Is the best approach to create tables like this:

news_id         int(10) unsigned PK
lang_id         int(2)
status          tinyint(1)
title           varchar(255)
title_en        varchar(255)
title_es        varchar(255)
content         text
content_en      text
content_es      text
date_inserted   datetime
date_modified   datetime
type            varchar(45)
atach           text

then create a table for the languages

Answer 1

You should only care about one language for any one particular request. While you could only select the language that the page request requires, it still isn’t best practice to organise your content in such a way.

What you should do is use locales and provide defaults for a content. Because while you might think you will always create two versions of a piece of content, in a less than perfect world this doesn’t always happen.

So, you would first create your model to reflect this relationship. For simplicity I will just refer to this as content. But you could of course have your content to be anything.

`content` (The Table)
id
status
title
content
dataCreated
dateModified
owner

`contentTranslations` (The Table)
id
contentId (FK)
locale
title
content
dateCreated
dateModified

Now, you just need a way to know which locale the user wishes to use. I prefer using Zend_Locale for managing all of my locales, and Zend_Translate for short key=>value translations. (This isn’t suitable for long content translations though).

When you know which locale you want to use, all you need to do is perform your query to select with a join.

The Beauty

The beauty of all of this however, is that if you haven’t created your content for a particular language version, then you can still default and roll onto your base language which the original article/content was written in.

SELECT c.id, c.status, c.title, c.content
FROM content as c
LEFT JOIN contentTranslations as t
ON c.id = t.contentId
WHERE c.id = 21231 AND t.locale = X