Two Langauges, One Site...

[gc40]

Greetings all,

I have made a CMS for a site where the admin can update text content on the home page....

 

They login to the admin panel and enter a title, and the body.

 

However, the client wants to offer two languages now. One English, and one French..

 

Therefore, I made the database changes by adding one extra field called body_french and changed body to body_english...

Now the admin enters the body for both english and french...

 

The problem comes when I display the database information on the home page.

How should I allow the client to select between English and French?

 

Should I use sessions? Or should I use a simple PHP If else fucntion?

 

Also, if I use sessions, can someone direct me how to start? I have never used sessions.

[cooldude832]

your over working yourself here

 

I'm going to explain a much more generic solution to you that will save you a bunch of work when they want German Spanish and simplified Chinese also

 

this is one way to do it

 

1) Make all your dynamic language areas into a database

2) Send this data through a translator (such as google translator) before echoing it out

3) Display data normally

so it be like

<?php
$string = "Hello World"
$string = lang_trans($string);
function lang_trans($string){
if(!ISSET($_SESSION['language'])){
  $lang = DEFAULT_LANG;
}
else{
$lang = $_SESSION['language'];
}
//Now send the string and language to go to to your translator and get it returned as $string
return $string
}
?>

 

The way you translate is up to you some people have develop php string langauge translator, but you can probably use cURL to send data to google and get it translated back (this might be slow)

 

Alternatively you can store statics in the translations, but this will be very space consuming if you expanding beyond 2 languages.

 

But to answer your question a session is the best mode (dual it with cookies if you want a stronger method)

 

Another way to do it is on every page load simply replace the entire page with the frame removed google translate version of it (very common solution and practical)

 

however this only works if your CMS is set up to display the page dynamically.

[maxudaskin]

What I would do if I were you is have a function that is put on a page that is required() in all pages. The function would be like so...

 

<?php
session_start();
if(empty ($_SESSION['lang'])){
if(!empty($_GET['lang'])){
$_SESSION['lang'] = $_GET['lang'];
}else{
echo '<form id="lang" name="lang" method="get" action="'.$PHP_SELF.'">';
echo '<select name="lang">';
echo '<option value="en">English</option>';
echo '<option value="fr">Français</option>';
echo '</select>';
echo '<button type="submit">Submit</button>';
echo '</form>';
}}else{
$lang = $_SESSION['lang'];
}
?>