Comments on: Localizing PHP web sites using gettext

By: links for 2008-04-25 | svenkubiak.de

links for 2008-04-25 | svenkubiak.de — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:54:15 +0000

[...] Localizing PHP web sites using gettext A widely used framework for internationalization is gettext. It can be used with a variety of programming languages, including PHP. There are basically two ways to use gettext in your PHP applications. You can use the native gettext PHP extension or you c (tags: php gettext localization tutorial web) [...]

By: Lars

Lars — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 04:43:15 +0000

I will have this “plugin problem” too - and very soon.

Thinking about it, I guess, one could translate the plugin via the usual way with e.g. poEdit - but use another textdomain for it.
If your plugin is called “plugin1″, you should be able to do this:

bindtextdomain(”messages”, “./locale”);
bind_textdomain_codeset(”messages”, “UTF-8″);
bindtextdomain(”plugin1″, “./locale”);
bind_textdomain_codeset(”plugin1″, “UTF-8″);
textdomain(”messages”);

This way you need the .po and .mo files calles plugin1.mo and plugin1.po in your locale directory.

To actually use these translations you would use dgettext which overrides your textdomain for just its call. Example:

echo _(”Normal output”);
echo dgettext(”plugin1″, “Plugin1 output”);

Hope this helps…

By: rado

rado — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 09:36:35 +0000

seeking for same thing :/

By: Till

Till — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 19:59:17 +0000

Must agree to Alex.
Has anyone a solution to that? (… which ‘plug into’ the core …)

By: Alex Hempton-Smith

Alex Hempton-Smith — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 22:41:28 +0000

I’m working on a project at the moment that will have modules which ‘plug into’ the core admin panel.
How would I provide more than one translation *.mo file? One for the core and one for each of the modules.

Thanks for a great article by the way

By: Scott Taylor

Scott Taylor — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 18:55:37 +0000

(third attempt to post this, second one got smart-quoted, which messes up the code sections)
Yes, Jaime, you can do multilingual web sites without being a programmer. Think of PHP as tags you can embed in regular html that get special processing on the server before they are sent to the user.

First, you need to make sure your web sever supports PHP and gettext. Odds are pretty good that it does, but you need to check. Make a new file and paste this into it:

Save the file as "phpinfo.php". Transfer the file to your web server, and then load it in a browser. If you see a long page of settings, including one that says "GetText Support - enabled" you are set up for localization! If not, you are stuck, and you’ll need to talk to a programmer.

Second, you need a localized web page.
Pablo’s excellent tutorial above covers how to tag the English phrases in your page. Make sure you save your web pages as .php instead of .html. Here’s an example web page, save it as "test.php".

English |
Spanish |
German

Bob.

Third, you need to use Poedit to scan your web pages, enter the translations, and save the "messages.mo" file. In his tutorial above, Pablo shows you how to create a German translation, but you can substitute English (en_US), Spanish (es_ES), Chinese (zh_CH), French (fr_FR), Japanese (ja_JP), etc. In Poedit I’d suggest choosing "utf-8" as your charset, rather than the "iso-8859-1" used in the tutorial, utf-8 supports more languages.

Fourth, you need a "localization.php" file. Create a new file called "localization.php". Copy this text into it:

$locale = false;
if (isSet($_GET["locale"])){
$locale = $_GET["locale"];
setcookie("locale", $locale, time()+60*60*24*30, "/");// save a cookie
}
if (!$locale && isSet($_COOKIE["locale"])){
$locale = $_COOKIE["locale"];
}
putenv("LC_ALL=$locale");//needed on some systems
putenv("LANGUAGE=$locale");//needed on some systems
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);
bindtextdomain("messages", "./locale");
bind_textdomain_codeset("messages", "UTF-8");
textdomain("messages");
?>

Pablo gives a similar example above, but this one is a slight improvement, it saves a cookie so you only have to have to set your locale once. You can also detect the user’s preferred language automatically, but that’s a lot more complex.

Finally, transfer your test web pages, the localization.php file, and your entire "locales" folder to your web server. Bring up the "test.php" page in your browser. Everything should show up in English. Now click on the language link. If you created a translation for that language, the page should show up translated!

If this does not work, it’s time to go get a programmer.

By: Scott Taylor

Scott Taylor — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 18:17:57 +0000

(second attempt at posting this, first one got tags stripped out)
Yes, Jaime, you can do multilingual web sites without being a programmer. Think of PHP as tags you can embed in regular html that get special processing on the server before they are sent to the user.

First, you need to make sure your web sever supports PHP and gettext. Odds are pretty good that it does, but you need to check. Make a new file and paste this into it:

Save the file as “phpinfo.php”. Transfer the file to your web server, and then load it in a browser. If you see a long page of settings, including one that says “GetText Support - enabled” you are set up for localization! If not, you are stuck, and you’ll need to talk to a programmer.

English |
Spanish |
German

Bob.

Third, you need to use Poedit to scan your web pages, enter the translations, and save the “messages.mo” file. In his tutorial above, Pablo shows you how to create a German translation, but you can substitute English (en_US), Spanish (es_ES), Chinese (zh_CH), French (fr_FR), Japanese (ja_JP), etc. In Poedit I’d suggest choosing “utf-8″ as your charset, rather than the “iso-8859-1″ used in the tutorial, utf-8 supports more languages.

Fourth, you need a “localization.php” file. Create a new file called “localization.php”. Copy this text into it:

$locale = false;
if (isSet($_GET["locale"])){
$locale = $_GET["locale"];
setcookie(”locale”, $locale, time()+60*60*24*30, “/”);// save a cookie
}
if (!$locale && isSet($_COOKIE["locale"])){
$locale = $_COOKIE["locale"];
}
putenv(”LC_ALL=$locale”);//needed on some systems
putenv(”LANGUAGE=$locale”);//needed on some systems
setlocale(LC_ALL, $locale);
bindtextdomain(”messages”, “./locale”);
bind_textdomain_codeset(”messages”, ‘UTF-8′);
textdomain(”messages”);
?>

Finally, transfer your test web pages, the localization.php file, and your entire “locales” folder to your web server. Bring up the “test.php” page in your browser. Everything should show up in English. Now click on the language link. If you created a translation for that language, the page should show up translated!

If this does not work, it’s time to go get a programmer.

By: Damian

Damian — Mon, 17 Sep 2007 16:03:09 +0000

The correct URL for poEdit’s website is http://www.poedit.net.

By: Jaime G.

Jaime G. — Tue, 11 Sep 2007 11:08:25 +0000

Great article. I’m not a programmer, just a writer, and belong to a multilingual community. I got as far as editing my strings in poedit, however after that I wasn’t able to do anymore. As I mentioned before, I’m not a programmer, and don’t know what is going on in the Php code, I only know simple Html. Is there anyway I can make my site multilingual, without having to know Php? I think I didn’t “include” the “localization.php” file correctly. If you know any resource for a non programmer such as myself, I’d appreciate it a lot thank you.

Jaime

By: B. Peter

B. Peter — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 14:59:29 +0000

Thank you for your great article.

I use Debian linux, apache 2 and php 5. I had to change only one line in your script:

putenv(”LANGUAGE=$locale”);

Peter