Multi-Language Project

Important

Multi-Language project must use utf-8 for everything. The charset of the project must be "utf-8".
The data in your database must be stored in unicode, otherwise your data will not be displayed properly.
Only the English language file is provided by our products, you'll need to prepare the language files for other languages yourself. You may also check our website and see if there are any user submitted language files. If you want to share your language files with others (without any conditions), you can submit your language file to us too.

Making Language Files

Note Language files are placed in the subfolder "languages" under the languages folder (e.g. C:\Users\<user>\AppData\Roaming\PHPMaker2023\languages). The files are used by all templates and extensions.

To translate a language, duplicate the shipped english.xml and rename it. It is recommended that the file name should contain alphanumeric characters (and underscore) and in lowercase only.

Open the new XML file with any text or XML editor, you'll see the root node:

You must change at least the id, name and desc attributes.
The id is an identifier for identifying the language, it must be a locale identifier using RFC 4646 language tags (which use hyphen, not underscore). The language ID should includes the region (e.g. "en-US", "de-DE"), if applicable.

The name is for displaying the language name in the user interface (which does not support unicode), it should contain alphanumeric characters, underscore and spaces only.

The desc is for displaying the language name in generated scripts, it can be in the encoding of the XML file.

For example, if you want to make language file for Traditional Chinese, you may rename the file as chinese.xml and modify the node as:
Since v2022 there is NO need to have a corresponding locale file for each language file, PHP built-in locale settings will be used. If you need to customize the settings, see Tools -> Locale Settings
You can edit or even add your own phrases. Just open the language file with any text or XML editor, edit/add your <phrase> nodes. Make sure you provide a unique id to each phrase. The id must be alphanumerical only.

The phrases are not limited to text, you can also use CSS class, e.g.
Language file is an XML file, when you edit the file, make sure that you keep it well-formed. If you use HTML tags or special characters in the attributes of the XML tags, you need to use entity references. For example, to insert the > symbol, you need to use <. Make sure your characters are supported by the encoding of the XML file specified in the processing instruction node (the first line). You can load the file in your browser to check if the file is well-formed, if it is, the browsers should be able to load and display it without any errors.

Note DO NOT use old language files from previous versions directly or the new phrases will be missing. You should compare the English version of the language files from old and new version and then add the new phrases to your new language file.

Selecting Language Files for Project

Click Tools -> Languages to select the languages you want to use in the project. If more than one language is selected, a combobox will appear on the top of the generated scripts for user to select language.

Enabling Multi-Language and Selecting Default Language

If you want to use multi-language project, make sure you have enabled Multi-Language in the PHP->General tab (see PHP Settings).

Then, select a Default Language in the PHP->General tab (see PHP Settings).

Multi-Language Property Editor

Note If you use single language, you do NOT need to use this editor, just enter your phrases in the general user interface. Only use this editor if you use Multi-Language.

Some text properties support Multi-Language. This editor allows you to enter your property values for each language. Supported properties are:

Table/Field Captions
Menu Text
Site Title and Footer Text
Table Page Names
Field Edit Tag Title
Field Error Message
Field Custom Message
Field Image Tag Alt
Field User Values

To edit these properties, click Tools -> Multi-Language Property Editor to open the editor. Alternatively, you can also click the small button next to above properties in the user interface to open.

Select a property in the Property pane on the left to edit, then enter your properties in unicode. For example, you can copy and paste from Word.

The editor supports import/export of the phrases (of the mutli-language properties only, not including the phrases in the language files):

Click the export button to export the phrases to a XML file so you can edit the file with text or XML editor or share the file with other project. Click thie import button to choose the XML file that you want to import so you can quicky use edited phrases or easily reuse other project's XML file.

Note Previously saved properties are displayed in bold font. Once you use this editor to save your unicode text, the saved unicode property values will always be used prior to the original property values (in the general user interface) . The original property value will only be used if unicode property value of the language cannot be found. If you want to edit the property, always go back to this editor. After editing and saving unicode properties, remember to re-generate the languages file and upload them again.

Sending Email in Multi-Language

There is a subfolder named "html" inside the template archive containing the following HTML email templates:

changepwd.html
notify.html
register.html
resetpwd.html

The content of these files are in English. To make email templates in other langauges, copy the files and rename the files and translate the content to the your languages. The files must be renamed as <original_file_name>_<language_id>.html. For example, the file notify.html should be renamed as notify_zh-TW.html if the file is to be translated into traditional Chinese. The files must be saved with utf-8 encoding.

Remember to put the translated files back into the "html" subfolder of the template archive.

Note If translated files not found in the "html" subfolder of the template archive and hence translated files not copied to the generated "html" subfolder, the default English version will be used.

Using Server Events

If you prefer to customize the language phrases by code, you can use the Language_Load server event. However, note that the Language_Load event cannot change the email templates, if you want to change the email content by server event, use Email_Sending server event to customize the Content property of the Email object. You can use the global function CurrentLanguageID() to get the current language ID and write your code accordingly. See Server Events and Client Scripts for more details.