General Support: Localization Implementation

Hello Plogger Team,

I have downloaded plogger and I am very impressed with how simple it is yet versatile enough to do all that I need. Great Job!! I will be using it for my hometown website and it should do nicely. It is much simpler than Gallery and Coppermine which suits me perfectly.

There is one major issue which I will need to work on.

Localization (translating to multiple languages).

I was trying to find any of your latest work to plogger and noticed the dev.plogger.org section, which I think may be your depot. I looked over the code, and from what I have sensed, it seems that for localization, you are relying on translating all the strings in files. I have a few proposals, for which if you are interested, I can send some code that I have already done for other issues.

Why not store the translations in a database? Basically, create 3 tables:
1. language table: contains specific language information such as language name, id, code and text direction (for right to left languages).
2. string table: Contains string ids and string name
3. langstring table: contains a list of translated strings indexed by stringid and langid

So what would be used is a localization object that would use a string_name (to be more code readable instead of just an id) and a language id and it would look up in the table to find the translated string. So all buttons, titles, and instructions would each have their own string id.

This would also allow for captions to be localized. The way it would work is on the page that captions would be entered for any pic, the user would get a text box for every language they have support for in their database.

There can also be a string management page where people can go and add their own new language and automatically get a list of all the strings they would need to translate to get support for their own language.

As I have stated, I have already created these objects and would be happy to share if you are interested to use them. I don't have these created within the framework of plogger, but I think it would be easy to integrate it.

Waiting for a resposne.

Roland