Recommended Technique to buid multi-language PHP website?

[ckchin]

Hi,

Could anyone share the good practices to build multi-language PHP website?

Let say, my index.php has 2 languages, when user select english (with his membership settings, for example) the welcome message is in english, else it is in second language like japanese, chinese, etc.

Any recommended techniques?

Can I include, a file, say called language.php, and in this file, I have array of messages in multiple languages, like english, japanses, etc:

$welcome = array ("english" => "welcome", "chinese" =>"xxx xxx xxx");
$goodday = array ( .....)

Hence, I can use this array to populate different languages based on user/member's preference ....

But, is this a good practices? Burden to the server?

Thanks in advance.

[jinkas]

personally, rather than arrays, i would have a different language file for each language with all the of phrases defined as constants, like:

// english.lan

define('WELCOME','Welcome to our web site!');
define('GOODBYE','Thanks for having visited us!');

// spanish.lan

define('WELCOME','Bienvenido a nuestro sitio web.');
define('GOODBYE','Gracias por habernos visitado.'); 

then just use a switch to include the appropriate file in each page based on the selection of your users

[JZA]

Good places to pick up best practices are in software like mambo where all the terms including menu items and structural information is definned so the definition can vary and you can easily build modules to update the site language.
A good example is mambo at www.mamboserver.org

[shrikie]

Take a look at smarty template system, that could really help speed things up

[Infizi]

one that i did, is based on jinkas idea,

at the top of my page i have my include, this included a link as the one below

require_once $full_path."/languages/".$lang.".lang"; 

Then, in my site i used variables to pass everything out, same variables defined in each script so you dont need lots of switches.

One other way is to use a databse, same idea,, like
Lang ID, Page_title, text1,link1
en Hello .. ..
fr Bonjour!

Either way will work

[Infizi]

(by the way, that was where i have a map at load, and my links include a magic id "&lang=en", or fr etc

[stereofrog]

Hi,

Could anyone share the good practices to build multi-language PHP website?

The best practice is to separate logic and presentation. Something like "welcome message" belongs to the presentation and I see no reason why it should be kept in php files (i.e. "logic").

Make different templates for each language with your template engine of choice (or bare php) and use what appropriate:

$lang = "en";
if(
         isset($_REQUEST['lang']) && 
         in_array($_REQUEST['lang'], $SUPPORTED_LANGS))
   $lang = $_REQUEST['lang'];

include "templates/$lang/welcome.php"; 

In addition, this allows you to use different layouts, images etc for different languages.