Re: [PHP] Multi lingual pages

On Fri, 2007-01-26 at 21:25 +0100, Otto Wyss wrote:
Paul Novitski wrote:

I formulated my question in general since I couldn't find an other
message here about supporting multiple languages.

http://www.w3.org/International/articles/

http://www.w3.org/TR/i18n-html-tech-lang/

http://php.net/setlocale

Thanks a lot, these are good points for reading.

1) Switching language downloads a new version of the current page,
generally with the same markup but new text. Example:
http://partcon.ca/

I'll favor this way especially if several languages have to be provided.

In both cases I store the text in database tables that contain a
language field I can select on to match the user's request.

I wonder if retrieving static texts from the database draws too much
performance. I know from somebody who stores texts in large data arrays
an uses shared memory, yet I haven't figured it out how.

Sure it does, but you can accumulate all the retrieved texts for a page
and cache them so subsequent hits only require a query for the cached
entries. If the page has some translations that may or may not show up
depending on certain values, then you can retrieve the cache, update the
cache with each translation not previously cached and then re-store the
cache. After a while you'll only make 1 query (2 if you're sloppy and
don't check a dirty bit for if the cache actually changed :)

Cheers,
Rob.
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