Ubercart

Hey Ryan,

I was thinking a simple process of using SimpleXML to parse the data of a given locate (e.g. en-US) and then wrapping this in an object which would provide an standard interface to accessing the different bits (in case the XML format changes).

You would first have to import the general data then the specific over the top i.e. for en-US you'd first parse en.xml and then merge with en-US.xml

I would say this is the way forward for I18n for UC and for Drupal in general as this data is updated and maintained by nearly all the major software publishers.

I was thinking about implementing a wrapper module for Drupal to use this data generally, but I admit it might be a big job. Even bigger to get people to start using it within their modules.

Anyway, it needs to be done I think.

Spot on. Its maintained by a big list of software manufacturers as they all use it in their code. Its not specific to PHP. Also the translations are produced by the governments (or appointed work groups by the governments) themselves so it should be fairly reliable. PHP doesn't have built in support for it (yet) and nobody in the Drupal community is talking about it (except here).

A general module would certainly benefit all localisation attempts by any module developers. I guess I really won't have time to do anything on this until after Xmas as I'll be on holiday from 19th Dec. - 26th Jan. but perhaps we could get a work group together to start looking at this and where people can register their interest (or would that place just be this thread?).

I'm proposing designing an object (Singleton I'm thinking) that provides a standard interface such as functions for formatting different date representations, currency etc according to a given locate. The standard interface to protect against change to the data structures.