Foobar's Rantpage

PmWiki supports internationalization (internationalisation) of web pages, allowing accented characters to appear in page names and almost complete customization of PmWiki's prompts. Most customization is provided via the XLPage() function in PmWiki, which loads a set of translation variables from a wiki page (typically named XLPage, but it can be named anything you wish).

The rest of this page is devoted to the installation, configuration and usage of other language(s) support. If you are looking for tools and help to localize PmWiki in your language, or how you can improve the existing translations, start on pmwiki.org with the page Localization - The Translation Portal.

Loading Translation Pages

Pages for many other languages have already been created and maintained at the pmichaud.com site. You can download an archive of these translations from http://www.pmwiki.org/pub/pmwiki/i18n/ . Simply download the appropriate language archive(s), and unpack the archive(s) into the directory containing your pmwiki.php installation. Each archive contains a number of page files that are placed in your wikilib.d/ directory, and some special scripts for translations that use a character set other than iso-8859-1 (PmWiki's default). You can also use UTF-8 charset.

Once the translation pages are installed, you enable a language by adding a call to XLPage() in your config.php file. For example, to select French language prompts, one would specify

include_once("scripts/xlpage-utf-8.php"); # optional
XLPage('fr','PmWikiFr.XLPage');

which says to load the translations for French ('fr') from the page PmWikiFr.XLPage?. The include_once line is recommended if you start a new wiki, and it should be placed before the XLPage line (for languages with alphabets other than the Latin, the include_once line is required). These lines should be placed near the beginning of config.php, but after any $WikiDir and $WikiLibDirs setting (if you have such setting).

It's possible to load multiple pages; so if you want to create your own local translations without changing the ones you got from an i18n archive, just create another page (see below) and load it first. Be sure that you load first the page with your local changes:

XLPage('fr','PmWikiFr.XLPageLocal');  # my local translations
XLPage('fr','PmWikiFr.XLPage');       # from i18n.tgz

If your intention is to offer multiple languages on your site, and use Wiki Groups as language selectors, you may want to place this code in local customizations files (see Group Customizations). For example, if your site is published in French and English, and the French pages are in a group called Fr, you could create a file named Fr.php in the local/ directory which contains:

<?php if (!defined('PmWiki')) exit();
##change to French language
XLPage('fr','PmWikiFr.XLPage');

You may wish to create a page called PmwikiFr.php with the same content to access the French documentation in the PmwikiFr group. En.php is not necessary in this case since English is the default language.

An alternative to the above would be to add to config.php the following, which tests if there is an XLPage in a group, and if it finds one it gets loaded (any language):

    
$xlpage = FmtPageName('$Group.XLPage', $pagename);
if (PageExists($xlpage)) XLPage($xlpage, $xlpage); 

With this method you would need to copy any relevant XLPage into any group which needs the different language support.

Another way (advanced) would be insert into config.php this script, it asks to the web server the headers received from the user's browser and select a language; example with spanish and english:

    
$lang = substr($_SERVER['HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE'], 0, 2);
switch ($lang){
   case "es":
      XLPage('es','PmWikiEs.XLPage');
      break;
   case "en":
      XLPage('en','PmWikiEn.XLPage');
      break;
   default:
      XLPage('en','PmWikiEn.XLPage');
      break;
}

See also

• Cookbook:MultiLanguage
• Cookbook:MultiLanguageViews

Creating New Translations

If language pages don't exist for your desired language, it's easy to create one! An XLPage translation file simply contains lines of the form

where "phrase" is an internationalized phrase (denoted by $[phrase]) in PmWiki's $...Fmt variables, and "translated phrase" is what should be printed in your particular language. For example, the line (in PmWikiFr.XLPage)

converts "$[Search]" to "Rechercher" on output. The file Localization:XLPageTemplate is a good starting point for creating a new XLPage and has most of PmWiki's key phrases already listed in it.

If you create new versions of PmWiki pages in other languages, please consider adding them to the main PmWiki site so that they can be made available to others in the i18n archives! (Be sure to check out The Localization Portal? for further information on effectively internationalizing PmWiki.)

Enabling "Special" Characters in WikiLinks

To enable "special" characters like for example German umlauts in WikiLinks, it is necessary to configure the server locale to ensure that PmWiki uses the proper character set definition.

If this is not possible due to limited access to the server configuration, PmWiki can be configured to use a specific locale by using the XLPage options (see XLPageTemplate).

For German umlauts, you'd need for example:

• 'Locale' => 'deu', <- for Windows servers, see MSDN List of locale identifiers
• 'Locale' => 'de_DE', <- for Linux servers; for the UTF-8 encoding, on some installations you may need to set 'de_DE.utf8' or 'de_DE.UTF-8'.

Note that the locale identifier depends on the operation system and perhaps on the specific installation.

Notes

   XLPage('es','PmWikiEs.XLPage');
   XLPage('fr','PmWikiFr.XLPage');
   XLPage('ru','PmWikiRu.XLPage');
   $XLLangs = array('en');

    XLPage('fr-ca', 'PmWikiFrCa.XLPage');
    XLPage('fr', 'PmWikiFr.XLPage');

    $XLLangs = array('fr', 'en');

    XLSDV('nl', array('my English expression'=>'mijn Nederlandse uitdrukking'));

  $local_string = XL("my English expression");