There’s quite a number of ways to approach localization (L10N) in PHP. Typing in “simple localization php” in Google yields an impressive amount of results. I won’t go into a heavy theoretical approach in what the best way is or that you need to use gettext or any such approach. I just want to present the function(s) I’m using and leave it up to you to decide whether you like the approach.
Archive for the ‘PHP’ Category
February22
A simple approach to Localization in PHP
January18
A Simple Front End Controller in PHP
A Front End Controller is part of an MVC pattern.
The controller receives input and initiates a response by making calls on model objects. An MVC application may be a collection of model/view/controller triplets, each responsible for a different UI element. MVC is often seen in web applications where the view is the HTML or XHTML generated by the app. The controller receives GET or POST input and decides what to do with it, handing over to domain objects (i.e. the model) that contain the business rules and know how to carry out specific tasks such as processing a new subscription.
January9
NIST RBAC Data Model
A good friend of mine asked if it was possible to log out of a Basic Authentication session. My first knee-jerk response was that Basic Authentication has no log out function and you should close the browser to safely log out of the session. After some days silence he came back with a script he’d found on the php.net site. The script used sessions to break the Basic Authentication behavior of the browser. It wasn’t a very successful script because it only worked in a limited set of browsers but it got me thinking about a better solution.
October3
Switching to WordPress
I finally succumbed to ease of use and switched from my bespoke PivotLog installation to WordPress. I thoroughly enjoyed Pivot but when switching from Textdrive to Amazon EC2 I had to change and migrate so many things that I settled for the easier solution; WordPress.
October2
A Query Engine for PHP
Looking at the code in the previous entry wasn’t exactly a pleasant aesthetic experience (sorry for that, bit of a botched job) so for my new project, an implementation of the NIST RBAC model in PHP, I decided to code a nice generic PHP query engine. The Query Engine takes a number of arguments like the SQL query, the arguments for the query (to be passed into prepared statements), the types of the arguments and whether the query is part of an overall transaction. The nice thing is that the QueryEngine function returns the results as an associative array using the database column names as the key value.
October2
Templates, template engines and PHP
In the process of developing Lilliput CMS I had to think about how to do templating with PHP. There’s a lot of material available regarding PHP and templating and most of it is really weird. Having had a look at the Top 25 PHP template engines I can’t for the life of me understand why I would want to use something like Smarty, Savant or phptal. Obviously a lot of love and attention has been poured into these solutions but I can’t escape the feeling that these template engines are recreating PHP and its innate templating function. This feeling was confirmed when reading the “Templates and template engines” article on the php patterns website.
My work for the Lilliput CMS has lead to some interesting new findings about PHP 5′s new DOM functions, particularly the XPath part of it. Whilst working on the templating structure for Lilliput I couldn’t get the DOM XPath queries to work on the file at hand, a normal XHTML 1.0 Strict document. With an external tool called XPath Explorer (XPE) every query evaluated correctly but as soon as I tried the same XPath expression in PHP it failed. After searching long and hard I came across a code snippet that contained the solution namely to explicitly declare the xhtml namespace for the DOM document you’re working on:
October2
Building the previous blog
This blog uses used a novel approach (I think) in that it is was entirely Atom 1.0 based. There is was no underlying (X)HTML, everything is was Atom (with a hint of XSL). I came to this approach after I figured out that it is silly to serve the same content in multiple formats when one format suffices. Modern browser are perfectly capable of executing XML/XSL that allow for the transformation of the Atom 1.0 feed into XHTML. There’s some nice stuff going, let’s dig into the details (hey I’m a technologist at heart so why not busy myself with the stuff I love).