Posted by Miles Thompson on 12/30/05 17:16

At 10:32 AM 12/30/2005, Dave M G wrote:

>PHP General,
>
> I have a site where I will set the interface up to be multilingual.
>This means that all the snippets of text which make up the menu and
>other elements of navigation common to most pages will be stored as
>variables.
>
> In most web site set ups that I have seen, especially on forums, the
>text is stored in a PHP script which is just a long list of variables.
>
> I wondered if there was any downside to storing the list of interface
>texts in a MySQL database, then calling them as an array when the page
>loads?
>
> This would have one minor advantage, which is that as I expand to new
>languages, I could build a simple web interface where people could input
>new languages into a form.
>
> However, is it a drag on a server to have to reach into the MySQL
>database to retrieve the array of texts each time the page loads? Note
>that the texts will be something like 20 to 30 small one to four word
>phrases like "contact" and "previous page" and that sort of thing.
>
> On the surface, it doesn't seem like this would be much different
> than
>accessing a PHP script with a list of variables. But then, I figured
>there might be a reason why I've never seen it done this way.
>
> Opinions would be much appreciated.
>
>--
>Dave M G

Dave,

I did that for an online auction site, now defunct, where the languages
could be German or English. To expand to Spanish one had only to supply the
structure and have someone who knew one of the other languages to enter the
correct terms. That would be pasted into the script and run, presto, the
site was available in Spanish.

Database hits ere not a problem, as all of the content on the page came
from a database, none of the content was static.

That was three years ago, and it was done that way because native language
support was "wobbly" in both PHP and Apache.

Joachem's solution is probably better for today.

Cheers - Miles Thompson


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