Best way to implement multilingual web application

Yii 1.1 General Discussion
1

I have a theme with two RTL and LTR direction versions. I want to load RTL version for RTL languages (such as Persian) and LTR version for non-RTL versions. What’s the “BEST” way to this in Yii framework ?

2

HI

simply you can check the Direction or language and then put such code in header part of "protected\views\layouts\main.php"




<html <?php if(Yii::app()->language == 'fa')  echo "dir='rtl'"; ?> 

xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="<?php echo Yii::app()->language; ?>" 

lang="<?php echo Yii::app()->language; ?>">

For CSS:




if Yii::app()->language =='en'  

{

// load LTR CSS

...

	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php echo Yii::app()->request->baseUrl; ?>/css/main.css" />

...

}

else {

// load RTL CSS

	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php echo Yii::app()->request->baseUrl; ?>/css/main-rtl.css" />

}

[b]one more thing!

Could you please share me your theme (theme with two RTL and LTR direction versions)

i need it.[/b]

3

In my case, I use a somewhat-customized bidirectional 12-column 960.gs. Here’s a possible theming with Arabic / French (easy to switch to Farsi / English):

[list=1]

[*]layouts/main.php:


<!doctype html>

<?php $baseUrl = Yii::app()->request->baseUrl; ?>

<html <?php  echo (Yii::app()->language === 'ar' ? 'dir="rtl" lang="ar"' : 'dir="ltr" lang="fr"');?>>

<head>

    <meta charset="utf-8">

    <title><?php echo CHtml::encode($this->pageTitle); ?></title>

    <meta name="description" content="">

    <meta name="keywords" content="">

    <meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1"><!-- for Google ChromeFrame this one breaks W3C HTML5 validation, there are easy workarounds, just google it -->

    <meta name="google-site-verification" content="">


    <!--[if lt IE 9]>

        <script src="//html5shiv.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/html5.js"></script>

    <![endif]-->


    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php echo $baseUrl; ?>/css/reset.css">

    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php echo $baseUrl . '/css/960-12' . (Yii::app()->language === 'ar' ? '-rtl' : '') . '.css';?>">

    <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="<?php echo $assets; ?>/css/yourCSS.css"><!-- of course replace it with your CSS file -->

    <link rel="shortcut icon" href="<?php echo $baseUrl; ?>/favicon.ico" type="image/x-icon">

</head>

<body<?php if(Yii::app()->language === 'ar') echo ' class="rtl"';?>>

    <div id="glo_c" class="c12">

        <header>

            <div id="logo" class="g5">

                …

            </div>

            <nav class="g7">

                …

            </nav>

        </header>


        <?php echo $content; ?>


        <footer>

            …

        </footer>

    </div><!-- end of #glo_c -->

</body>

</html>

[*]column2.php:


<?php $this->beginContent('//layouts/main'); ?>

    <nav class="g12">

        <?php if (isset($this->breadcrumbs)) {

                  $this->widget('zii.widgets.CBreadcrumbs', array(

                      'links'=>$this->breadcrumbs,

                  ));

              } ?>

    </nav>

    <aside class="g3">

        <?php $this->beginWidget('zii.widgets.CPortlet', array(

                'title'=>'Operations',

            )); ?>

            <?php $this->widget('zii.widgets.CMenu', array(

                    'items'       => $this->menu,

                    'encodeLabel' => false,

                    'htmlOptions' => array('class'=>'operations'),

                )); ?>

        <?php $this->endWidget(); ?>

    </aside>

    <article class="g9">

        <?php echo $content; ?>

    </article>

<?php $this->endContent(); ?>

[/list]

And here are attached my 960-12.css, 960-12-rtl.css, and Eric Meyer-based reset.css, in addition to a fully-commented 960-12-commented.css (LTR version)