PHPMaster.com has posted the fifth part of their "Localizing PHP Applications 'The Right Way'" series, this time with a focus on extracting data from the .pot template files to define in your PHP. (This is the final part of the series.)

In Part 4 you learned how to use gettext for one of the most complex aspects of localization a developer can face, plural forms. In this, the final part of the five-part series, I'll teach you how you to automate part of the localization process by extracting msgids and generating a PO template file (.pot) from your application's PHP code.

They show how to use the xgettext command-line tool to pull out strings from your source and automatically make them into a domain template. They help you set up three sample PHP files and run the xgettext command on them to pull out messages defined in the text of the files to set up keys in the template. Screenshots are included showing how to use Poedit to use these templates for your new translations.