I'm about to start work on a new project of mine and i want to build in the future functionality of multiple languages.

The way i have it in my head is that i would have a select field on every page with the different menu options and using AJAX, when a user changes the language on any page the new language will follow the user throughout the site until changed again.

Example:
The index.php page has a default of English so it loads with the en.php file which holds all site variables in English. Once the language has been changed the the session variable that was set to en.php by default will change to the new language French by putting the fr.php into the language session variable.

The problem is how do i refresh the page without reloading it completely. The reason being i cant see a way that the AJAX can reload all the page variables or am i wrong.
If i enclosed the whole site in a span would it refresh upon a new language being selected?

Any help appreciated as always.

__________________
Irish Gaming Network | Stolen Car Listings

really I'd forget about using ajax to do this .... whats the advantage over just reloading the complete page ? Yes it sounds cool .... I've got the languages tied into an ajax refresh mechanism ...

You're going to have to give all of your strings id's and update them all .. which means loading the new language file completely and doing lots of parsing ... personally I think its better to do it server side.

__________________
Forbairt Media | Web Design & Development Galway / Dublin, Ireland - coming soon ... ( vague but descriptive isn't it )
Recent Work: Safari Club African Safari Holidays - South Africa Safaris
Other Stuff: FluffyLinkulator Rapid Inclusion Service Tools

It's best to use a directory structure too rather than passing variables on an index.php file or similar.

A directory is more semantically structured and can you can geo-target a directory a lot easier than something like index.php?lang=en.

en.site.com / fr.site.com
or
site.com/en/ site.com/fr

is the way to go. Be sure to the ISO Country identifiers (fr/de/en/es/it/jp).

I setup something similar a few weeks ago with Wordpress MU. I have an English and Polish blog running off the same system.
ammado blog + Polski blog ammado

__________________
my blog | Apple Mac Blog | Indie Music Blog | *

So maybe just have a JS onchange function for the select box and once that function runs just have a reload page statement and change the session variable for the language!?

Was planing on something along the line of site.com/en/, is there much difference or is it better to use a subdomain like en.site.com over site.com/en/?

__________________
Irish Gaming Network | Stolen Car Listings

You're kinda contradicting yourself here ...

If you're planning on having en.site.com or site.com/en ... then having the page stay the same but changing language is a bit crazy no ?

For indexing purposes as well ... having Javascript links to the other languages isn't really ideal.

__________________
Forbairt Media | Web Design & Development Galway / Dublin, Ireland - coming soon ... ( vague but descriptive isn't it )
Recent Work: Safari Club African Safari Holidays - South Africa Safaris
Other Stuff: FluffyLinkulator Rapid Inclusion Service Tools

Small difference alright. You actually have to dig into the balckhat world to find out what though...

Personally I prefer subdirs, but little or no difference for most sites.

__________________
Search Engine Optimisation - Red Cardinal Internet Marketing
Internet Consultant Ireland | Search Engine Optimisation Services
Catering Company Dublin - My sister's handmade canape company!

Well originally i was planning on just having a session variable that would have 'en' or 'fr' and based on that then an include('lang/'.$_SESSION['lang'].'.php'); on each page and if the lang session variable isn't set then default it to 'en', the problem is just not sure how to change the language, like said before AJAX wouldn't be recommend, so not sure where to go from that!?

__________________
Irish Gaming Network | Stolen Car Listings

dont know if it interests you (and there are other versions of this type of thing) but i was researching the building of a site (2 languages) in the joomla CMS ...... and i came accross an interesting plugin called joomfish - it doesnt do translations but acts as a sort of translation management system --- seemed to be pretty good and i'd say it would be what i would use if i was doing a multilinugal site

__________________
RainRain Web Design - OneWeekofDays

I much prefer subdomains as they look cleaner and are more visible than subdirectories . It's a tad bit easier for a French user to bring up fr.site.com rather than site.com/fr because the browser history drop down will be populated with more relevant results (as in they start typing fr into their browser, it brings up fr.site.com/etc... straight away which is probably what they want rather than site.com/fr/whatever.. which brings up all the site.com pages before they enter fr). Do you get that?

__________________
my blog | Apple Mac Blog | Indie Music Blog | *

I get what your saying and i can see where your coming from, nothing more annoying then hundreds of link options popping up from your history when typing in a URL!

__________________
Irish Gaming Network | Stolen Car Listings