Stories from August 6th, 2008

Localisation Update

I'm very pleased to report that I'm on the final few templates in my quest to make the front end of Pixaria fully localisable (translatable into other languages). This is an important development as nearly half of all Pixaria users are from non English speaking countries and the ability to quickly and easily translate the software without going into the templates is a very important consideration.

Because the localisation process involves editing templates, the update which includes the changes will include modifications to every front end template in the software as all user readable text is replaced by short codes for the language conversion.

As an example, consider this bit of HTML from the lightbox template index.lightbox/lightbox.share.sent.tpl and how it looks before and after the process:

Before:

<p>A link to your lightbox has been e-mailed to {$name}.</p>

After:

<p>##LIGHTBOX_63##</p>

The text inside the two HTML paragraph tags is now stored in a PHP file for English language text (called en_GB.php) like this:

$strings['LIGHTBOX_63'] = "A link to your lightbox has been e-mailed to \$name.";

If you've made modifications to the front end templates of your site and you want to make use of the new localisation capabilities, you will need to bear these changes in mind when you upgrade and make sure you check the template comparison tool.

Currently, the only templates remaining to be converted are some of the store and cart files. Once this work is done in the next week or two, I'll be good to go with a public release that includes the changes.