summaryrefslogtreecommitdiff
path: root/docs/language.txt
blob: 9d6a0db329d67cfbd154d3ebf2c2618cd4d6d890 (plain)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
language.txt

The Language object handles all readable text produced by the
software. The most used function is getMessage(), usually
called with the wrapper function wfMsg() which calls that method
on the global language object. It just returns a piece of text
given a text key. It is recommended that you use each key only
once--bits of text in different contexts that happen to be
identical in English may not be in other languages, so it's
better to add new keys than to reuse them a lot. Likewise,
if there is text that gets combined with things like names and
titles, it is better to put markers like "$1" inside a piece
of text and use str_replace() than to compose such messages in
code, because their order may change in other languages too.

While the system is running, there will be one global language
object, which will be a subtype of Language. The methods in
these objects will return the native text requested if available,
otherwise they fall back to sending English text (which is why
the LanguageEn object has no code at all--it just inherits the
English defaults of the Language base class).

The names of the namespaces are also contained in the language
object, though the numbers are fixed.