As part of a project we are involved in there is a need for externalization of messages, both error and labels from the application into an external file.

From within Java, this is available as message and resource bundles, and the Spring framework smoothens this process.

In PHP this is another story, as the options are:

a) gettetxt – http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.gettext.php

b) Zend Translate – http://framework.zend.com/manual/en/zend.translate.html

Since this is not a very large application, we will be using ini files with the message keys encoded as english strings based on analysis at http://stackoverflow.com/questions/216478/gettext-is-it-a-good-idea-for-the-message-id-to-be-the-english-text

I will see how that one proceeds along