While working at my CMS I was thinking on what would be the best way to manage the various languages and still make it easy to write the apps. After some thinking and taking the advice of a collegue into consideration I came to the conclusion that it would be best to let all strings go through a function. The internationalization function __(”); why this function? Because it’s pretty much becoming a standard in other CMS. And I don’t want to make it hard for other devs if they need to understand my script.

Now what exactly will this function do?

First of all we want the string that we enter via this function to be translated into other languages. Now so we first need to know some information and ask yourself a few questions before programming. Like what languages has the user set? Are these languages active? Where do we find the translation? What if the translation is incorrect, how can the user change them?

So we could just make the translations hardcoded, but that wouldn’t be quite usable for a normal administrator to change these translations. Thats why we will also put them into the a DB Table. And of course this table will just be a reference for the backend since we do not want to go fetch a translation from the database all the time. Thats why you should store it in a file, this way it will be a lot faster. Ok yes you can cache it, but still if the cache is turned off retrieving them from files is a lot faster than running multiple queries. Now how to save them in files could be done in various ways. They could be stored in an .ini or .txt file and a line can be added each time there is a new translation. But storing them in a .php file would be a lot faster since the .ini, .txt files would have to be parsed each time. While when you would put the translations in an array the data is instantly available for use.

Now if there is a better way to store them in a PHP file then please let me know. But we’re just going to with this method. What the array could look like is this:

array(
'english' => array(
'hello' => 'hello',
'how are you?' => 'how are you?',
),
'french' => array(
'hello' => 'bonjour',
'how are you?' => 'comment ça va?',
),
);

Now when adding a new translation to the PHP file via fwrite it would be hard to put it on X amount of locations ( X = languages ) and than write it back again. Now that would be possible but it’s probably going to coss more load. Now a better (but temporary) way to do it I think could be by simply adding $lang[$language][$text] = $ translation; at the bottom. And then you could create a cronjob that will sort out these language files properly at the end of every day or make a script in the admin area for an administrator to do it. Now adding them directly to the array by finding the correct location could also work well.

Now how would you let the function create the translations for the other languages than the one you wrote it in? One way would be just duplicate the text and wait for an admin to change the values with the correct translations in the DB Table and then let it go to the file again. But a smart way would be to let it go through a Translator API and the generated translation would be ok 90% of the time.

What if the function already found a translation?

In this case you can just select the array of the language you’re currently working and than see if the string has been translated and go fetch it. Otherwise the function would have to do the steps described above.
Anyways, these were my thoughts on how to create a good internationalization function. Now there could definitely be some easier ways to create it, and if you found one please let me know! I hope you learnt a bit on how to create it and I’m going to try and put this idea into code very soon =).

Changelog:

- Added backend admin system
- Added authorization (better roles etc.)
- Added admin core modules (+ override feature)
- Fixxed error handler with buffers activated (all systems: rss, ajax, main and backend)
- Added several core modules ( dashboard, settings, …)
- Base Paths for includes, requires, templates etc. (much more stable when moving the application)
- Created seperation in templates ( private => backend, public => frontend)
- Mod Rewrite feature implented

The admin core modules come standard in the Nexus CMS. But they can be overriden by user modules. They are pretty much the same as site modules but they do not have XML files, rss or ajax request handler which is pretty obvious why =). Also they live in a restricted area, unauthorized users have no access to anything related to the core. When the override feature is activated for a certain module the system will skip scanning for an admin core module but will instantly check if the site module has a control.php file to manage the administration from the site modules. The admin HTML documents are located between the frontend HTML. This override will allow a programmer to keep pretty much every operation of his site in the frontend modules. But if they like they can also create a seperate core module.

You can activate apache’s mod_rewrite from the admin backend (in a core module).  The mod rewrite isn’t actually deactivated so you can still manually type the URL’s more decently when it is turned off. The rewritten URL’s look like this: ?com=News  => /main/News/ or  ?com=Portfolio&offset=3  => /main/Portfolio/offset/3/ . The last rewrite with the variables still has to be implented, but the basic one is already working. You on’t have to define this when you write it in your template, I thought it would be a lot easier not to use some kind of syntax like {LINK=”?com=News” , “/main/News/”} . This syntax was never implented, instead I just created a function in the Template class that runs at the very end before we display. It rewrites all the ?com= links to the correct rewritten links if mod rewrite is turned on.

To do list:

- Implement caching system
- Change language constants and use an internationalisation function instead.
=> These language strings will be stored in the database. The default is hardcoded and in English.
- Add more backend modules

So thats pretty much my latest changes at the Nexus CMS so far . It has been smoothened up a lot, and runs a lot more stable.
So far it’s looking very good and I might release an Alpha version soon.

Teasers might come soon so stay subscribed!

Passive modules are also again divided into critical and unnecessary ones. Passive modules that are critical for the system will terminate the program when they aren’t executed properly or when they just simply don’t exist but are listed. When the other type of passive module isn’t found the program will just simply continue because it forms no risk. However in both cases an administrator will be alerted.

The active modules are modules that do have displays, they often manage news, forums, users, etc. When these modules aren’t found the user will simply be redirected to the default one. There can only be one active module at a time but several passive. They can be turned on and off in the admin area. I don’t know if there is any system like this out there yet or if this is the best way to do it. But this is just how I do it. And I prefer beeing unique and creative than just simply copying off other people their code. Anyhow, now the coding of the modules can begin and this also means the actual content of the system!

So far i´ve got the basic structure finished it has some nice features. I didn´t really base myself on some other system but I did try to create a template system. It works like this :

First action i define a Constant “In_Site”,  all my scripts are written in an IF statement to see if it is defined otherwise it wont run. Its to prevent messy errors when u go to the script directly. What happends next is I load in the config and functions wich are static and no operation occurs. Next we establish the database connection with the help of my DB class. Im still working on it tough and trying to figure out if there is a way to rollback DB events when an error occurs. I know this is possible with MySQLite so now I have to do some digging in the MySQL documentation because thats the DB im using. If the rollback function exists im going to let occur within custom error handling. The try and catch statement. After the DB class comes the settings wich require the DB connection to fetch the settings. And then we get to the templating part.

The template part loads in the default template if it exists and it then processs the variables it finds inside the tpl. Such as {SITETITLE}. Then the module gets processed for example ´News´ and while this happends u can still make changes to the template and at the end the entire part gets printed.

Or well that´s at least what I will be trying to achieve. Right now I have got the a part of the Template and Database class finished. Ill be figuring out the module part and how it loads into the template part out later.

But so far it already looks nice, I even made a custom layout for the CMS.
Ill upload some screenies soon ^^.

Greets,
Vincent