Making plugins translatable

Author	Timo A. Hummel
Created	5th November 2003
Audience	Plugin Developers
Applies to	Contenido 4.4 or later

The plugin's configuration

If your plugin has actions which needs to be translatable (of course :)), you need a plugin configuration file.

This file needs to be placed in the "includes"-Directory of your plugin and needs to be named config.plugin.php.

Example:

<?php

/* Config file for the TEST plugin */
$lngAct["test_dosomething"] = i18n("Does something useful", "test");

?>

Note that the plugin developer doesn't need to take care of the i18n domain binding; all that is done during initialisation.

Letting Contenido know about foreign "domains"

A "domain" in terms of the GNU gettext library defines in which path a specific translation can be found. For plugins, the domain is automatically set to the plugin's directory. All you need to do is to create a directory structure similar to Contenido's locale directory, and place .po files in it (note: The .po-Files need to be named like your plugin's name and plugin directory, e.g. the plugin "test" should reside in the directory "test" and the .po-Files have to be named "test.po").

Translating plugins

To create a translated string in the plugin itself, you need to use i18n("TEXT","<DOMAIN>");. In the example above, we would write i18n("TEXT","test");. Note that domain names are case sensitive.

Where's the magic?

Originally, the "magic" (including the plugin's configuration and i18n domain bindings) took place in the file config.php. As config.php is included even if we don't have a backend language (in fact, the information about the backend language is never available in the config file), the magic happens in cfg_language_de.inc.php. This is the only place where the proper initialisation of the plugin's config.plugin.php file can be guaranteed.