On the Ibuildings techPortal today they've posted the latest episode in their DPC Radio series as recorded at last year's Dutch PHP Conference. This episode is Martin de Keijzer's talk Let's take over the world with Zend Framework.

Many people use Zend Framework for it's MVC implementation, but it has a lot of hidden gems. Internationalization (i18n) is one of them. We will look how you can create an application that will have the right languages, currencies, dates and times all based on the location of the visiting user. This session will take away a lot of headaches in international projects and will improve the quality in overall.

To listen you can either use the in-page player, download the mp3 or subscribe to their feed to get the latest. Martin's slides are also posted to Slideshare.

In a recent post to his blog Anna Filina looks at internationalization in Doctrine and how Symfony auto-builds things to take care of it for you.

If you use Doctrine, then you probably know how lazy loading can hurt your performance. I carefully craft every query to everything that I need in one shot, but only what I need. One thing that evaded me at first was the i18n part. I am pleased with the way Doctrine + symfony magically creates all my models and database tables with i18n support.

She talks a bit about the internationalization (i18n) support is put into the schema.yml file and the bit of confusion she had over how to handle a left join using its structure. The key lies in the Translation relationships.

On the Zend Developer Zone Stas Malyshev has posted a new tutorial looking at the internationalization features that come bundled with PHP 5.3.

PHP 5.3 has been recently released and one of the new features in core is the internationalization extension. It allows you to support a multitude of languages and local formats much easier than before, without having to learn all the tiny the details of local formats and rules.

The internationalization extension makes it simpler to handle various language support in your application. Stas lists out some of the functionality included (including locale, number formatting and normalizing) and code samples to illustrate their use.

The DevX website has recently posted this tutorial - a look at simple internationalization for your website.

If you develop Web applications that have an international target audience, then you have to take internationalization into account'"a process that includes avoiding date/time or currency confusions and delivering all text pertinent to the user interface in the user's preferred language. Applications that can grow international traffic and improve revenue must respect their clients' needs.

They use the I18N PEAR package to handle most of the hard work and include the howto on grabbing the package, the structure and how to use it to get a country name from a code, work with the translation of numbers, currency and changing up date/time strings.

Wen Huang has made a quick post to his blog about some of the comments Andrei Zmievski about the future of PHP, specifically on internationalization and UTF-8's place in it.

I attended the SF PHP Meetup last night where Andrei Zmievski (PHP 6 release manager and PHP core team member) gave a talk on PHP 6 and internationalization (i18n). [...] It was evident that Andrei and team have given quite a bit of thought into what i18n means for the PHP world, and as a result, PHP developers everywhere will soon be enjoying a new set of tools to enable faster development of multi-lingual sites.

He also mentions the back-port that several of these features will get into the upcoming PHP 5.3 release (along with the much-hyped namespace support). You can check out Andrei's talk on his website.

On the ThinkPHP blog, Florian Eibeck has posted an overview of some key things to consider when internationalizing your application/website.

The biggest problem is that most developers lack knowledge about Internationalisation, Localisation, Character encodings, Unicode and all those terms connected with multilingualism. The following article should give you a basic understanding and show you how to avoid those funny characters.

He defines a few terms - internationalization, ASCII, unicode and the UTF-8/ISO-8859 character sets. He mentions how to accept the utf-8 string into your application and how to use it in both PHP and store it in a MySQL database.

Matthew Weir O'Phinney has written up a post for his blog outlining some of the other cool little features that were included in the recent release of the Zend Framework, specifically with the Zend_Form component.

I've been working on for the past few weeks, and it's nearing release readiness. There are a number of features that Cal didn't cover in his DevZone coverage (in part because some of them weren't yet complete) that I'd like to showcase.

These additional features Matthew mentions are:

• Internationalization
• Element Grouping
• Array Support

Check out more of the great features of the component in the Zend Framework documentation.

The CakePHP podcast, "The Show" has posted their latest episode - The Low Down On Internationalization (i18n):

Larry Masters joins us once again to discuss internationalization and localization features in the upcoming CakePHP 1.2 release.

You can download this edition directly from their servers (via the mp3 link) or you can point your favorite feed reader at their podcast feed and get each show as it comes out.

The Bakery has five new items they've recently posted - a few new articles, helper information and tutorials. Here's the list:

• CSV Helper - I was recently outputting some comma-delimited data and thought I would benefit from a simple csv helper
• p28n, the top to bottom persistent internationalization tutorial - For some developers, allowing a website to support multiple languages is essential. Luckily cakePHP 1.2 has the foundations available to make this possible.
• Tracking navigation history of a user - Many times it can be very useful to track the navigation history of a user. [...] With this HistoryComponent, it's extremely easy to handle such actions.
• Habtm hacks to menage columns in both models - I had a habtm relationship between two models and when i did a "findall" in a model i couldn't filter the rows with a clause from the the other model.
• SecureGet Component - I am not pretending this can replace ACL or more complex implementation, it's just a small component, inspired a bit from the Security component.

If you're a CakePHP developer, you'd do well to check out The Bakery for these and more great Cake-related articles, tutorials and information.

Gerd Schauffelberger introduces a new package today as a part of his work with the pat-tools group - the patI18n package for internationalization.

In lack of a better idea, I founded a new PAT Package: patI18n. So far this package is just a draft and only exists in the SVN repository. As you might guess, patI18n is an abstraction layer for translating issues. Therefore it provides nearly the same interface as the famous GNU Gettext. Still, the actual translation is done by a chain of modules - this way everything is possible and the design stays open to new ideas.

He talks briefly about how it came to be and how it varies from some of the more traditional language translation tools. You can check out the example on his development environment or just use the snv details provided to grab the latest copy.