Re: [Phpwebsite-developers] Multi-lingual sites

[Karsten D. <k.d...@tu...>]

On Fri, Mar 23, 2001 at 04:36:55PM -0500, Todd Owen wrote:
> As an ongoing project we should think about a better way to make phpWebSi=
te
> multi-lingual on demand.  We are only multi-lingual before installation.
> I'd like to see the user profile containing his/her default language
> preference.

I like the current way of doing this. I disliked it at first, but the
reasons for the current approach are good (if you don't have to have
multiple languages, it is (a lot) faster). But I see the need for on demand
language switching.

> phpmyadmin using the following language include file scheme:
>=20
> english.inc.php
> [...]
> german.inc.php
> [...]
> Has anyone used this many DEFINE statements in an include file?  Were the=
re
> any performance issues?

I think this is the most common approach. To me it seems to have no deep
impact on speed. But I would use a different scheme. I would include the
appropriate language file, which would contain statements like
  $TRANSLATE["xxx"]=3D"fgdsfhsk";

This way we could introduce this very easily into the existing code base. In
fact I am going to code this, and make it available as one more "language"
when running makedistro.sh. Does anyone object on this? I think we should at
least try this...

Combined with a new theme engine, which really should have cacheing
abilities, you could minimise the performance impact some more. And if you
switch language files on the fly by using a prefix, you could even use the
same prefix as databse prefix, theme prefix, whatever. This way you could
even have language specific colours, content, ...

Regards,
Karsten
--=20
Why do we have to hide from the police, daddy?
Because we use emacs, son. They use vi.
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