The DevX website has recently posted this tutorial - a look at simple internationalization for your website.

If you develop Web applications that have an international target audience, then you have to take internationalization into account'"a process that includes avoiding date/time or currency confusions and delivering all text pertinent to the user interface in the user's preferred language. Applications that can grow international traffic and improve revenue must respect their clients' needs.

They use the I18N PEAR package to handle most of the hard work and include the howto on grabbing the package, the structure and how to use it to get a country name from a code, work with the translation of numbers, currency and changing up date/time strings.

Wen Huang has made a quick post to his blog about some of the comments Andrei Zmievski about the future of PHP, specifically on internationalization and UTF-8's place in it.

I attended the SF PHP Meetup last night where Andrei Zmievski (PHP 6 release manager and PHP core team member) gave a talk on PHP 6 and internationalization (i18n). [...] It was evident that Andrei and team have given quite a bit of thought into what i18n means for the PHP world, and as a result, PHP developers everywhere will soon be enjoying a new set of tools to enable faster development of multi-lingual sites.

He also mentions the back-port that several of these features will get into the upcoming PHP 5.3 release (along with the much-hyped namespace support). You can check out Andrei's talk on his website.

On the ThinkPHP blog, Florian Eibeck has posted an overview of some key things to consider when internationalizing your application/website.

The biggest problem is that most developers lack knowledge about Internationalisation, Localisation, Character encodings, Unicode and all those terms connected with multilingualism. The following article should give you a basic understanding and show you how to avoid those funny characters.

He defines a few terms - internationalization, ASCII, unicode and the UTF-8/ISO-8859 character sets. He mentions how to accept the utf-8 string into your application and how to use it in both PHP and store it in a MySQL database.

Matthew Weir O'Phinney has written up a post for his blog outlining some of the other cool little features that were included in the recent release of the Zend Framework, specifically with the Zend_Form component.

I've been working on for the past few weeks, and it's nearing release readiness. There are a number of features that Cal didn't cover in his DevZone coverage (in part because some of them weren't yet complete) that I'd like to showcase.

These additional features Matthew mentions are:

• Internationalization
• Element Grouping
• Array Support

Check out more of the great features of the component in the Zend Framework documentation.

The CakePHP podcast, "The Show" has posted their latest episode - The Low Down On Internationalization (i18n):

Larry Masters joins us once again to discuss internationalization and localization features in the upcoming CakePHP 1.2 release.

You can download this edition directly from their servers (via the mp3 link) or you can point your favorite feed reader at their podcast feed and get each show as it comes out.

The Bakery has five new items they've recently posted - a few new articles, helper information and tutorials. Here's the list:

• CSV Helper - I was recently outputting some comma-delimited data and thought I would benefit from a simple csv helper
• p28n, the top to bottom persistent internationalization tutorial - For some developers, allowing a website to support multiple languages is essential. Luckily cakePHP 1.2 has the foundations available to make this possible.
• Tracking navigation history of a user - Many times it can be very useful to track the navigation history of a user. [...] With this HistoryComponent, it's extremely easy to handle such actions.
• Habtm hacks to menage columns in both models - I had a habtm relationship between two models and when i did a "findall" in a model i couldn't filter the rows with a clause from the the other model.
• SecureGet Component - I am not pretending this can replace ACL or more complex implementation, it's just a small component, inspired a bit from the Security component.

If you're a CakePHP developer, you'd do well to check out The Bakery for these and more great Cake-related articles, tutorials and information.

Gerd Schauffelberger introduces a new package today as a part of his work with the pat-tools group - the patI18n package for internationalization.

In lack of a better idea, I founded a new PAT Package: patI18n. So far this package is just a draft and only exists in the SVN repository. As you might guess, patI18n is an abstraction layer for translating issues. Therefore it provides nearly the same interface as the famous GNU Gettext. Still, the actual translation is done by a chain of modules - this way everything is possible and the design stays open to new ideas.

He talks briefly about how it came to be and how it varies from some of the more traditional language translation tools. You can check out the example on his development environment or just use the snv details provided to grab the latest copy.

In a new post on the Northclick blog today, there's a tutorial that looks to make it easy to use the gettext functionality that PHP offers to internationalize your site.

This tutorial is for people who start or want to optimize the internationalization of their PHP Apps. We wrote it due the lack of useful resources. Although there are many tutorials for gettext out there it is still a very complicated issue.

They start with the Pros and Cons of using the functionality like "it's the defacto-standard for i18n of unix systems and their applications" versus things like "debbuging gettext can be hard in PHP". The rest of the post is broken up into five steps:

• Generate Functions and init gettext
• Translate your Application
• Generate a pot file (Template)
• Generate your PO Files from your POT Template and translate
• Generate Binaries

They also offer some helpful hints too like how to update the translation files and some solutions to some common issues you might come across.

On Andrei Zmievski's blog today, there's a new post looking at new features of the upcoming PHP6 series - specifically dealing with internationalization and Unicode support.

I have been working on the Unicode support in PHP for quite a while now and I figure that it is time to start talking about Unicode and I18N in general and specifically about some of the new features that PHP 6 will be bringing to the table.

He first covers the new TextIterator class, as "swiss-army kife-like" tool that gives the user abilities to work with text units (really their boundaries) in a simple, normalized way. Of course, definitions and code follow to illustrate the point with examples ranging from interpreting a string out to grabbing certain bits of the string.

He also introduces the opposite twin of the TextIterator class - ReverseTextIterator. It's basic function is to (basically) do everything its twin does, only in reverse.