A weblog about coding, interface design, productivity and the art of making people love the web.

Posts tagged: codeigniter


Translating multilingual websites the easy way

One of the biggest challenges in web development is making multilingual websites. The easy part is having common functionality across all available versions. The hard part is making sure you don't have blank spots. And that means that if you got an English-French website, you shouldn't have French words appearing in the English version and vice versa.

 

Multilingual CodeIgniter made easy


How I stopped worrying and started to love multilingual sites. A smart and easy trick for having your website gathering anything translatable on it's own.

 

The oldest solution I can remember used in PHP is the use of constants. For example instead of writing Home page in your HTML, you write __HOME_PAGE__. Then you got a file for every language with constants that you include in every "visible" PHP script. An if block takes care of including the proper constants file for the currently active language. The major problem of this technique is that if something is left untranslated you get ugly __CONSTANTS__ all over the place. There are few things that can make a website look more amateur.

 

In CodeIgniter there is the language class that takes care of this issue. Instead of using constants you simply do $this->lang->line('Home page') to get the translation for the words Home page. Then you got files in the "application/language" folder with all the translatable items.The problem with this approach is that when something is left untranslated you don't know how to find it easily.

 

I recently took over a multilingual e-shop platform project for an agency. A great friend and colleague there came up with a solution for this which is to extend the language class and add the ability to the line method to add marks before and after a string in case there is no translation available. For example Home page becomes !-- Home page --!.

 

Although this time we are more organized and flexible since we can for example enable/disable/customize the !-- --! marks you will notice that practically we are still in the footprints of the ugly constants trick. We still get !-- Ugly --! stuff in our website in case a translation is forgotten. The worst part is that we still have to scan the entire site by hand and hunt down every little !-- untranslated word --!.

 

To overcome all of the above problems there are two simple things we can do. The first one is to add semantics to all strings we want to translate. This way Home page is different from home page and we can ease the guy/girl translating our content who won't have to figure out when a word starts a sentence or not.

Tower of babel The tower of babel

 

The best part is that we can have all the items we want to translate gathered automatically without the need for spot marks (!-- --!). To achieve this you need to follow these steps

 

  1. Create a simple two column table in the database called translations (id INT, item VARCHAR 1024)
  2. When the line method of the language class finds an item that doesn't have a translation available make a check to see if this item is stored in the translations table.
  3. If it is not stored then create a line with the exact text you use in your language files. In our case this is $lang['Home page'] = '';
    Insert this line in the translations table.
  4. Create two pages. One called something like 'translations' and another called 'translations_clear'. The translations page should run a simple select query to get all the items and just display them in the browser. The translations_clear page should just empty the translations table.
  5. Run a spider against your page to make sure all links are visited. Any decent offline browser should do the trick. Windows users can use Httrack and linux users wget.
  6. Visit the translations page after the spider is done. You will get a page with all the items inside an array ready to be translated. Simply copy the entire page to your language file and start translating.

This way you can have web pages that are translated in one step, right before you fire your FTP client for the final upload. Also when something is added later but is not translated you won't get __UGLY__ stuff in your page. You don't have to use CodeIgniter to use this technique. All it takes is that you use a function to fetch the translated items.

Sunday, August 9, 2009, 10:33. Tagged: codeigniter

Taking care of the www issue in CodeIgniter

One of the problems that came up with the rising dependency on Google and SEO in general is the use of www. On the one hand there is no reason to use www anymore. 100% of modern browsers use the HTTP protocol by default so you don't need to specify that you need to access the web part of a domain. It makes your site's address larger and harder to remember, more ugly, less likely to fit alongside a logo. Also many suspect that it has an effect on your keyword density, therefore harming your search engine rank just a little bit.

 

On the other hand most of the users still keep the old habit of typing www.site.com in the address bar. I try to redirect to the "clean" version of the domain on all my sites. Even if the user uses the www he's not harmed at all.

 

Still not made up your mind about the three annoying letters that take forever to say ? Read a great post by sitepoint or check out what Matt Mullenweg of Wordpress has done about it.

 

In fact most of the times nobody even notices. One way or another there is a solution to this. Whether you want to get rid of that 90s annoyance or you want to keep your domain a classic www there is an easy way to do this in codeigniter.

 

 

First create a hook in /application/config/hooks.php

$hook['post_controller_constructor'][] = array(
 'class'    => 'Utils_hook',
 'function' => 'redirect_to_base',
 'filename' => 'utils_hook.php',
 'filepath' => 'hooks'
);

 

This tells CodeIgniter to execute the "redirect_to_base" method before the controller starts executing it's own methods. Then you need to create the file /application/hooks/utils_hook.php and place the following code inside

Class Utils_hook {
 function redirect_to_base(){
  $ci = & get_instance();
  $uri = $ci->uri->uri_string();
  // recreates the URL
  $location = substr(base_url(),0,strlen(base_url())-1).$uri;
  
  $active_base_url = 'http://'.$_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'].'/';
  
  if (($active_base_url != base_url()) && ($_SERVER['SERVER_ADDR'] != '127.0.0.1')){
   Header( "HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently" );
   Header( "Location: $location" );
  }
 } 
}

 

This way the visitor is always redirected to the URL version you want even if he entered through an old bookmark such as http://www.sitename.com/action/example/

Friday, July 24, 2009, 21:11. Tagged: codeigniter code

Templates in CodeIgniter

One of the most annoying stuff for CodeIgniter developers is having to include a header/footer/etc part in each and every view. CodeIgniter out of the box does not include template support (in the sence of a Joomla template or Wordpress theme). I have created a small library to assist you in using "templates" in CodeIgniter.

Download


Download Templates for CodeIgniter 0.1


How to use

1) First copy the file MY_loader.php to your application/libraries folder.

2) Check the example folder to see how a template should look like.

3) Simply do:

$this->load->template('template_name', $data); 
$this->load->view('view_name', $data);


The template loading is done in pretty much the same way as the views loading. However please read the comments inside the MY_loader.php file. It takes one minute and you'll get the whole picture about how you can pass $data arrays containing variables.

Saturday, July 18, 2009, 07:00. Tagged: downloads code codeigniter