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How is the localization managed

To localize Flus, I use the “old-but-still-good” gettext() function which is aliased by _() (you might have seen it from time to time).

Gettext allows me to write the code in full English (instead of some sort of key string). It means that I can write directly, for instance <?= _('Login') ?> instead of <?= _('loginPage.form.submit') ?> for a submit button in a login form. It also means English is the default language of Flus.

For the other languages (only French at the moment), the locale files are placed under the locales/ folder. Each language defines at least three files. For French:

  • locales/fr_FR/metadata.json declares (only) the language in a human-readable way (“Français”);
  • locales/fr_FR/LC_MESSAGES/main.po is where the strings are translated
  • locales/fr_FR/LC_MESSAGES/main.mo is the compiled version of this file, used by PHP.

I don’t manipulate the two last files directly, but I use Poedit, a translation editor which is able to manipulate po and mo files.

PHP is told where to find these files with the bindtextdomain() function and the language to use is set with setlocale(). All this happens in the src/Application.php file.

Sometimes, I need to localize strings within the JavaScript code. In this case, the _() function is a bit different since it's not provided by PHP. It must be imported:

import _ from 'js/l10n.js';

console.log(_('Hello World!'));

The function will look into the window.jsConfiguration.l10n object to search for the string. To add a new translation to this object, you’ll have to add the string to the $translations array from the src/utils/javascript_configuration.php file