Phplist Translation
Several people are currently working on translations of PHPlist. The translation is split into frontend and backend.
Frontend
The Frontend refers to all the pages viewable by the public (such as subscribe page, preferences page, etc.), as opposed to the administrators (such as attributes, send a message, etc.).
All frontend texts are currently stored in the texts directory that can be found in the lists directory in the phplist distribution. To translate the texts (or to change the default ones), edit the english.inc file and save it to some other name. Then refer to this file in your config file.
Backend
The Backend of PHPlist refers to all the pages viewable only by administrators (with the various functions: user, messages, system, etc.) Translating the admin pages is a bit more complex. You can now download the latest translation pack from the CVS site. This is updated every night. It will contain three directories:
- lan: this contains all the language strings for short bits of text on every page
- info: this contains the "information" on each page, that is located at the top of the page
- help: this contains content of help pages that are opened when clicking on a question mark (currently only in the "send" page)
NOTE: When new texts appear during development we will try to add them to the end of each file, clearly indicating that they are new.
The texts are in files that have exactly the same name as the file in the admin directory. They will contain code like:
To include the new language in the drop down menu of the admin backend, you will need to edit the admin/language.php file and uncomment the line with the language you translated, by removing the # at the beginning of the line, e.g.: #"it"=>array("Italian "," iso-8859-1, windows-1252 "),
Important information
- Do not touch the English text on the left of the arrow: only change the translated text on the right of the arrow.
- If you use a quote in the translated text, make sure to escape it (\') otherwise the file will fail to parse. Example: don't must be written don\'t
- If you need to use accents, please use HTML coding. Example:
'été ŕ Paris' must be written: 'été á Paris'
There are a few files that are more general than just the pages. These are common.php and pagetitles.php. common.php has a few things that are used in many different pages (such as the menu items) and pagetitles.php contain the translation of the pagetitle of every page.
IMPORTANT: If you are thinking about translating PHPlist, please make sure to check with the translators mailinglist to see if anyone else is already doing that language.
Checking your translation
If you have access to setting up your own development environment you can check your translation by loading the "checki18n" page. If not, you can send your translation to the mailinglist and we will try to add it as soon as we can. Once committed to Subversion, you can check the translation via the DEV website.
For example, log in to the DEV site change to your language and then load the checki18n page Anything in purple has been translated successfully, anything in red still requires a translation.
Related topics
CategoryTranslation
