Translations	Information on translating and localizing LnBlog.
Translation Mechanisms	LnBlog supports two distinct translation mechanisms.
Translation Interface	LnBlog uses four key functions to translate strings.
Ad Hoc Translation Format	The ad hoc translation mechanism used by LnBLog takes the form of a simple PHP array.
Charset issues	All LnBlog templates are encoded as ISO-8859-1 characters in the 7-bit character code range, which (if my understanding is correct) is compatible with UTF-8.

Translation Mechanisms

LnBlog supports two distinct translation mechanisms. The recommended method is to use the PHP module for GNU gettext. The “fallback” method is an ad hoc function that reads strings from a file in a PHP array. This is provided because gettext, while widely used in the free software community, is not a standard PHP module and so is not available on all web hosts. If you wish to provide a translation to be included with LnBlog, then please try to support both options. Note that, with a little scripting ability, a gettext translation could be automatically converted to the ad hoc format. Such a tool will probably be included with LnBlog in the future.

Translation Interface

LnBlog uses four key functions to translate strings. When extracting translatable strings from the source code using xgettext, you will need to account for these. They are listed below.

_()	The simple translation marker. This function simply returns the translation its single argument. If no translation is available, returns the argument.
p_()	Print translation. Like _(), but prints the translation instead of returning it.
pf_()	Print formatted translation. Like p_(), but allows printf() scancodes to be embedded into the string. Like printf(), this takes a variable number of arguments, with the first being the string to translate.
spf_()	Like pf_(), but returns the translation instead of printing it. This is analogous to sprintf in the same way that pf_() is analogous to printf().

To extract the strings translated by these functions, you can use the --keyword argument to xgettext, which comes with GNU gettext. The command would look something like this.

xgettext -LPHP --keyword=_:1 --keyword=p_:1 --keyword=pf_:1 --keyword=spf_:1 *.php

Ad Hoc Translation Format

The ad hoc translation mechanism used by LnBLog takes the form of a simple PHP array. The translation file must create the array and populate it. Each element of the array will be indexed by the untranslated US English text and will contain the translated text as its data. If you are familiat with GNU gettext, the array index is analogous to the msgid and element content is analogous to the msgstr.

Here is a simple example of an ad hoc translation file. Note that the PHP opening and closing tags are required, as is the array creation on the second line. Also note that there can be no characters ot whitespace outside the PHP tags.

<?php
$strings = array();
$strings["My message."] = "Translated message.";
?>

Charset issues

All LnBlog templates are encoded as ISO-8859-1 characters in the 7-bit character code range, which (if my understanding is correct) is compatible with UTF-8. Therefore, if you are working in a language that requires characters outside the 7-bit ASCII range (codes 0-127), then you should use a character set compatible with 7-bit ASCII. In the Unicode world, this generally means UTF-8. If you use a different character encoding, it might be necessary to re-encode all the templates using that encoding.