[Web-erp-developers] Translation

[Phil D. <we...@pa...>]

Gentlemen,

I have been having a play with gettext and have it working - it needs to
be enabled on your server.... if its not the system will product only
english. The CVS has a couple of strings in the italian messages.po for
the purposes I certainly would not vouch for the accuracy of the
translations !! However, clearly shows that it is going to work
brilliantly.... IF WE have the determination and staying power to
convert every string assigment/print statement and echo statement in the
whole system.

Frankly, I am seriously daunted by the propsect and will not be able to
do it on my own. 

A few points about the conversion ...

Page $title = _('Page Title'); should also be encapsulated in the get
text function.

Single quotes ' are faster than double quotes " - PHP has to parse the
contents of double quotes for variable substitutions but doesn't for
single quotes. Strings that have variables in the middle and spaces or
html tags need to be broken up ideally eg.

echo "<P>A long string full of $NumberOfCharacters characters";

would need to be re-written as:

echo '<P>' . _('A long string full of') . ' ' . $NumberOfCharacters . '
' . _('characters');

I think it would be better to avoid having html or trailing spaces in
the translation strings.

Jessie Peterson made a modification to the DB_query function such that
the repetitive use of

if (DB_error_no($db) !=0) { .....

is no longer necessary - all you need to do is send DB_query the error
message as the 3rd parameter, the 4th parameter is the Debug message and
the 5th is whether the query is inside a transaction that should
rollback. This might be a good opportunity to tidy up calls to DB_query
to use these extra parameters too? This would take quite a bit of code
out of the scripts.

Some submit buttons have their value checked - clearly the value of a
submit button - what is displayed on the face of it - will need to be
inside a gettext function call - so too must the comparison string eg.

say a submit button named 'Search' is tested to see if it is hit - the
value of the button will need to be changed to the local language -
assuming the button is to have a local language label....

if ($_POST['Search'] == _('Search Now')){

Steve's approach to "eating the elephant" seemed good - lets break it
down to bite sized chunks ....

I'll kick off with:

AccountGroups.php
AgedDebtors.php
AgedSuppliers.php
Areas.php
BOMInquiry.php
BOMListing.php

Steve - would you have a go at:

BOMs.php
BankAccounts.php
BankMatching.php
BankReconciliation.php
COGSGLPostings.php
CompanyPreferences.php

Luca - would you have a go at:

ConfirmDispatchControlled_Invoice.php
ConfirmDispatch_Invoice.php
CreditItemsControlled.php
CreditStatus.php
Credit_Invoice.php
Currencies.php

Rom - would you have a go at:

CustEDISetup.php
CustWhereAlloc.php
CustomerBranches.php
CustomerInquiry.php
CustomerReceipt.php
CustomerTransInquiry.php


The major worry here is introducing new bugs so please test the scripts
individually and thoroughly before emailing me with them.

Any other offers to help would be fantastic.

Let me know if there are any other ideas or areas of ambiguity. 

If you need to see how to convert a script look at index.php or
UserSettings.php

Phil