The Pehapkari.cz blog has continued their series covering domain-driven design with the latest post in the series showing some alternative relational database mapping techniques.

Do you think that multilingual text must always be in a separate database table? Than this article is for you!

We will show that not all arrays have to be mapped as database tables. And we will also show the Doctrine implementation.

The article starts with a bit of background on what they're trying to accomplish: adding internationalization functionality to an e-commerce application. In order to make it simpler to work with the multi-language requirements they show the abstraction of its handling out into a LangValue value object that's used to store the product name value for each language. They then use this and some JSON encoded data to store the different language strings in the database directly with the product record rather than a different table. It then shows how to create the matching Doctrine entity for the LangValueType to work with the serialized column data and extract data from it's JSON blob.

The Toptal.com site has a tutorial posted from Igor Gomes dos Santos about building a multilingual site with a combination of gettext and PHP.

Whether you are building a website or a full-fledged web application, making it accessible to a wider audience often requires it to be available in different languages and locales.

Fundamental differences between most human languages make this anything but easy. The differences in grammar rules, language nuances, date formats, and more combine to make localization a unique and formidable challenge. [...] The way your code is organized, and how your components and interface are designed, plays an important role in determining how easily you can localize your application.

The tutorial starts off talking about some of the difficulties that come along with internationalization of an application and how localization comes into play. He then starts talking about gettext and links to several PHP libraries that can help you integrate support for it into a current (or new) application. He walks you through the setup of gettext, how the PO/MO files are structured and other things to like about like domain separation, locale codes and the directory structure of your PO/MO files. He then gets into a practical example, showing a sample PO file's contents, two schools of thought on the identifiers in the file and a simple template that uses the "gettext" to get a translation. He also includes code to set up the locale correctly and create the language files for it to use.

Tom McFarlin has continued his series covering internationalization in WordPress applications with this latest part of the series. In the previous part of the series he introduced some of the basic topics and terms. In this new tutorial he gets more into functionality creating the plugin he'll use in his examples.

Given that WordPress powers roughly 25% of the web and that the web is not local to your country of origin, it makes sense to ensure that the work that we produce can be translated into other locations.

To be clear, this does not mean that you, as the developer, are responsible for translating all of the strings in your codebase into the various languages that your customers may use. Instead, it means that you use the proper APIs to ensure someone else can come along and provide translations for them.

He then walks you through the download of the latest WordPress version (a Subversion checkout) and the creation of the plugin structure. He provides sample code to define the plugin and shows how it should look in the "Plugins" listing. He helps you add in the menu item with internationalized strings for the link text. They help you add a simple screen for the plugin and help you style the page a bit. The post ends with a brief mention of object-oriented programming but points out that OOP introduces other, not necessarily related, topics that could detract from the WordPress-related content (and so will not be used).

The TutsPlus.com site has kicked off a new set of posts today with he first part of their series covering internationalization in WordPress applications.

A few years ago, I wrote about the process of internationalizing WordPress-based projects. Though I think there are some times when tutorials don't necessarily need updating, refreshing, or revisiting, there are other times in which we can all benefit from revisiting the topic.

After all, software changes from year to year, and we also gain experience as we continue to work with a given piece of software. WordPress is no different.

They'll be covering what internationalization is, how it works within WordPress, the difference between internationalization and localization and more. In this first part of the series, though, they briefly cover some of the functions and functionality you might see as a part of WordPress already to make internationalization possible.

The SitePoint PHP blog has posted a tutorial from Younes Rafie that wants to help demystify internationalization functionality in your PHP application...with the help from a handy extension, the intl extension.

Most applications perform locale aware operations like working with texts, dates, timezones, etc. The PHP Intl extension provides a good API for accessing the widely known ICU library’s functions.

He walks you through the installation of the extension if you don't have it already for both PHP 5 and PHP 7 (the second requires adding a custom apt-get repository). With that all installed and configured he starts in on the code to output a simple message with formatting using the MessageFormat functionality. His first example is in English but he also shows the difference between that and Arabic and Bengali and they're related output. He looks at a few other topics including pluralization, "choices" (different messages for different values) and more complex cases. He ends the post briefly looking at message parsing - extracting a value according to the provided format.

The SitePoint PHP blog has a post from editor Bruno Skvorc showing you how to integrate gettext with Twig to make it easier to internationalize your application with multiple languages and strings.

There are many approaches for adding new languages to your application’s UI. Though some userland solutions like symfony/translation are arguably simpler to use, they’re slower than the good old native gettext by an order of several magnitudes.

In this tutorial, we’ll modify an English-only application to use gettext. Through this, we’ll demonstrate that getting internationalization up and running in an already existing app is not only possible, but relatively easy.

He starts with some of the bootstrapping you'll need to do to get the "nofw" project up, Twig installed and them hooked together. He briefly introduces gettext and how it's used in PHP (with the _() handling) and provides an example defining a locale and the language files to match. He shows how to generate the .pot files, add a new language and the code needed to hook in the Twig_Extensions_Extension_I18n extension. The post ends with some "bonus scripts" to help make things a bit simpler: bash scripts to hide some of the complexity of the process.

In this new tutorial to the NetTuts.com site author Jeff Reifman shows you how to use the Google Translate API to translate the content in your application/website to the language of your choosing. In his examples, he shows how to integrate it with a Yii framework application.

In this tutorial, I'll walk you through my extensions to the Yii I18n extract script which do exactly this. And I'll demonstrate translating my startup application, Meeting Planner, into a handful of languages. Keep in mind, Google Translate isn't perfect and it doesn't address issues related to time and date formats and currencies. But for a quick and affordable (free) way to build default translations for your web application into 50+ languages, this is an ideal solution.

He starts with a brief introduction to the Google Translate API, the languages it supports and how to install the library he's chosen to make the connection. He then gets into the internationalization (i18n) functionality that Yii has (an introduction to that is here) and how to define the "messages" files with the different content strings. These files are defined to there's no need to call out to the API for every piece of content that loads. He shows how to extend the message extraction handling to add in the API request and parsing the result. This information is then added to the current message information files, making it simpler to add in new strings. He then integrates this into the Meeting Planner application and shows how to run the script to call the Google API and switch the language with image results in several different languages of the finished output.

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.

On the SitePoint PHP blog they've posted the second part of the series looking at using the FigDice for the templates in your application. In this new post they expand on the basics presented in part one and look at internationalization.

In part one of this two-part series I started looking at FigDice, a PHP templating system that takes a slightly different approach to most. [...] In this second and final part we're going to add a simple blog to our example site, which allows us to look in more detail at Figdice's concept of data feeds. We'll also look at internationalization, translating some of the site's content into a couple of additional languages.

In this part of the series (part two of two) they create a simple blog application based on their "Feed" class from before, faking some basic content. He then creates the factory class the FigDice templating will fetch the data from and makes a view to use it. He also talks about the optional functionality to add additional data to the feed output as attributes on the element. Finally he shows how to work all of this back into the HTTP framework under a "blog/post" URL.

On the Lingohub site there's a new post showing how internationalization (i18n) is handled in 5 major PHP frameworks - CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Zend Framework Symfony and Yii.

As discussed in the previous articles on PHP internationalization, PHP provides native support for string translation using gettext and PHP arrays. These can be used in any PHP project. Additionally, some popular PHP frameworks offer their own way of string translation. In this article, I want to provide a brief summary of the internationalization process with five of the most popular PHP frameworks currently out there. In this How-To you will read about using CodeIgniter, CakePHP, Zend, Yii and Symphony.

There's only a bit of sample code here, so it's not a complete tutorial for all of them. Mostly its links to more information about how each framework does things - modules used, formats and configurations.