NYCPHP Meetup

[Marc Antony Vose]

Hi there.

I develop sites with my own custom publishing engine that I've been 
adding to since about 1998...all in PHP.  My goals are to keep it as 
modular as possible, so I can easily plug in different bits of 
functionality, and provide my clients with the greatest amount of 
flexibility in terms of what it can be used for.

So, with that mindset, I'm interested in how people here have 
approached multilingual sites in a PHP/MySQL environment?  In 
particular, I have an upcoming cultural project that will be 
translated into an unknown number of languages, and only in bits and 
pieces.  So, at any given point in the content hierarchy, the system 
will need to look for a preferred language, and if it isn't found, go 
to the next on the list, and so on.

(This is similar to the way Mac OS X works if any of you have used it.)

The content will vary in terms of scope, length and type; right now, 
I tend to utilize MySQL for text data storage about 80% of the time, 
and the other 20% of the time I store textual content in text files, 
as serialized PHP objects.  I always store graphics in the filesystem.

So, I have my own ideas on how I am going to approach this, but here 
are my questions.

How do you handle multilingual sites?  Do you tend to store data in 
text files, in a database, or some other way?  Do you maintain 
different entire databases for each language, or different tables in 
the same database, or just different columns in the same table(s)?

Looking for abstract answers here about strategy.

Thanks much,

-- 
Marc Antony Vose
http://www.suzerain.com/

Never underestimate the power of human stupidity.
-- Lazarus Long