Over on the O'Reilly network this morning, there's a new excerpt from the PHP Cookbook (published by them, of course) about Internationalization and Localization with PHP.

The excerpt starts off with telling you how the two differ, and moves quickly into how to get your images and text to work all over the world. This article covers an object-oriented method for localizing plain text messages and images. The PHP Cookbook contains additional recipes for dates, times, and currency. There are also recipes on using GNU gettext and other I18N and L10N topics.

The arrays and functions that it helps you create are quite useful, really. The only problem is that you still have to do a lot of the work yourself, translating information that you think the website will use. And, of course, as they put it: internationalizing your PHP application is not a labor of Hercules. When you organize your localizations within an object hierarchy, it's easy to extend your classes to support new countries and regions without difficulties.