In the latest part of their series of "building a startup" application in PHP, NetTuts.com looks at supporting internationalization with the functionality of the Yii framework.

This is part four of the Building Your Startup With PHP series on Tuts+. In this series, I'm guiding you through launching a startup from concept to reality using my Meeting Planner app as a real life example. Every step along the way, we'll release the Meeting Planner code as open source examples you can learn from. We'll also address startup-related business issues as they arise. In this tutorial, I wanted to step back and add I18n internationalization support to our application before we build more and more code.

They start off with a look at some of the overall goals of internationalization (i18n) and about how it works in the Yii system. It uses placeholders with a key/value system to replace the data based on which language is selected. They show you how to configure Yii's support including default language, sorting of the data and files to exclude when looking for i18n configurations. With this configuration in place they show how to use the command line tool to extract these messages out into separate folders for easier management and faster reference. Finally they show how to select a language and use the Yii code generator together with the translations to create models and forms.