Internationalization PHP web sites using Smarty and gettext

What do we need?

1. Gettext extention enabled in your PHP installation.
2. Smarty gettext plugin, you can download it from sourceforge: http://sourceforge.net/projects/smarty-gettext/

Step I: Prepare your templates.
This is really easy step you jest need to put text you want to translate between {t}{/t},
example:
{t}translate this{/t}
OR
{t 1=$customers 2=$orders}There are %1 customers waiting for %2 orders.{/t}

The {t} block should be registered in the smarty. So the following code should be added while creating new smarty class.

require('Smarty.class.php');
require('smarty-gettext.php');

$this -> Smarty();
$this->register_block('t', 'smarty_translate');

smarty_translate is the method in the smarty gettext plugin which handles the translation.

Step II: Prepare input files for gettext
To do this you will need a tsmarty2c.php file from Smarty gettex plugin, and use it in console, here is an example:
php tsmarty2c.php PATH_TO_YOUR_TEMPLATE_DIR/template.tpl > template.c

php.exe is present in the installation path of PHP(C:\wamp\bin\php\php5.2.9) and it is a CLI(Command line interpreter) file. It will parse the tsmarty2c.php and generate the C file in the specified path.

Repeat this step for every file,
Step III: Prepare a .po file
To create a .po file you will need to use xgettext utility, for every .c file you created in the step II. Here is an example how to use it:
$ xgettext -o dictionary.po --join-existing --omit-header --no-location template.c

This file has two parts: header, and dictionary part, which you will need to edit.
msgid "translate this"
msgstr "here goes your translation"

Step IV: Convert .po file to .mo using msgfmt utility.

After translating everything, you will need to create the .mo file, here is example
$ msgfmt -o dictionary.mo dictionary.po

Step V: Prepare directory structure.
Gettext library has requires that files are stored in appropriate directory structure, here is an example:
/locale
/pl_PL
/LC_MESSAGES
smartybook.po
smartybook.mo

Step VI: Finale!
The final step is to tell your application to use translation that you have prepared. Below is an example of the PHP code you can use:
$language_code = 'pl_PL';
putenv("LANG=$language_code");
setlocale(LC_ALL, $language_code);
$domain = 'dictionary';
bindtextdomain($domain, './locale');
bind_textdomain_codeset( $domain, 'UTF-8');
textdomain($domain);

Need to set proper path to 'local' directory, used by a bindtextdomain function