For ages, we've been using PHP variables to do the localisation. It was not
really easy to maintain, but it worked quite well. However impossibility of
using standard tools for translations was still annoying. So I really wanted
to move to some standard, what seems to be Gettext.
Once I've played with Gettext in PHP, I realised how broken it is and that it
is not a good idea to use it. However it is not that hard to implement in PHP
and some people already did that. From these findings it was just a small
step to implement it.
Well not really small step, because at first I've chosen the more complicated
way and tried to create sed magic to move all strings to places where they
belong. But this turned out to be nearly impossible and at FOSDEM I realised
that there is also much easier way to just keep the messages in one file and
migrate them as needed. This way the migration is really fast and not touching
most of the code.
So here we are. Currently it is in separate branch (called gettext), however
I hope to merge it soon, because I'm not aware of any problems right now.
The nice benefit this gives to us is web based interface for
translations.
