Multilingual texts

Locale allows you to change the language of your app based on the selected locale.

To use the multilingual text features of the Locale module, Cherrycake uses the cherrycake_locale_texts and cherrycake_locale_textcategories database tables with the following structure:

You can create this tables in your database by importing the locale.sql file you'll find in the Cherrycake skeleton repository, under the install/database directory.

Text categories

Optionally, texts in the database can be organized in categories, this might come in handy if you have lots of texts.

Add your text categories as rows to the cherrycake_locale_textcategories table, here's the columns specification:

• code A unique identifier for the category, you'll be using it later to refer to this category in your code.

• description Describe the kind of texts you'll be storing in this category.

Adding texts

Add translated texts as rows to the cherrycake_locale_texts table, with this column specification:

• textCategories_id The category id assigned in the cherrycake_locale_textcategories table.

• code A unique identifier for the text, you'll be using it later to refer to this text in your code.

• description Describe this text, and the context where it will be used.

• text_en The text in english.

Retrieving multilingual texts

To retrieve a text based on the current locale language, use the Locale::getText method. Imagine the cherrycake_locale_textcategories like this:

id	code	description
1	general	General texts used throughout the site.

And the cherrycake_locale_texts tables like this:

id	textCategories_id	code	description	text_en	text_es
1	1	test	The typical test text used as an example.	Hello world	Hola mundo

You would access the text like this:

echo $e->Locale->getText("general/test");
$e->Locale->setLocale("spain");
echo $e->Locale->getText("general/test");

Hello world
Hola mundo

See this example working in the Cherrycake documentation examples site.

Adding new languages

To add new languages, just add new columns to the cherrycake_locale_texts table. The column name must follow the syntax text_<language code> For example, to add a text field for spanish, add the a field named text_es.

Variables in localized texts

You can use simple variables in localized texts to help you build more complex sentences, like this:

textCategories_id	code	text_en	text_es
1	newMessages	You have {numberOfMessages} new messages.	Tienes {numberOfMessages} mensajes nuevos.

echo $e->Locale->getText("general/newMessages", [
    "variables" => [
        "numberOfMessages" => 5
    ]
]);

You have 5 new messages.

See this example working in the Cherrycake documentation examples site.