turnipville dot comarooski

For those of you who have spent any time tweaking, installing, massaging, and customizing a Joomla! installation – or better yet, doing so with components – you might share my frustration here.

It’s typical for larger PHP-based CMS suites to provide a massive collection of language-specific text strings for use throughout the program. These strings are almost always included in a series of files, based on the appropriate language, with names like “english.php.”

Since these files are always available for us to edit, why not include that activity as something in the administrator GUI?

In other words: please help reduce the volume of posts in popular support forums, by cutting out questions like:

How do I change the text that comes up in the content navigation buttons at the bottom of each post?

Nine times out of ten, that verbiage is stashed in english.php – somewhere in the hierarchy. Come on superstar PHP gurus…can’t we make a something in the back end that lets you easily change every string addressed in that file?

/rant.

Update: I’ve just learned that Joomla! DID offer manipulation of the language files through the Language Manager prior to 1.5.x. It’s a bit embarrassing that I probably worked through 30 Joomla 1.0.x installations without realizing that the Language Manager did exactly what I was looking for…only to learn about it after they discontinued it. *sigh*