I recently received quite a lot of love because of Globalite. Even though I tried to write some documentation about the plugin, I know that there’s not much. I also know that there’s a difference between showing how to set a locale and how to actually use that code in a real application.

To fill this gap I wrote a very simple and rough Rails sample application with a fully localized User Interface:

UI Localization sample app

Looking at the code you will find out how to:

  • use a different css per locale (language/country)
  • use a different picture per locale
  • set a default css/picture if the translator doesn’t specify one
  • UI localization
  • rails core localization examples
  • create a select box of available UI translations
  • get/set the locale only a specific user so other users start by seeing the default translation
  • use a translation with many dynamic arguments
  • nested translation

note: I froze Edge for this sample app (it wasn’t required, Globalite works well with older version of Rails).

To install and run the app, just do the following:

$ svn checkout http://globalite.googlecode.com/svn/sample/ui globalite-sample-app

edit config/database.example and rename it config/database.yml

$ rake db:create

$ rake db:migrate

$ ruby script/server

Don’t hesitate to leave a comment, submit a Rails core localization file in your language or submit a bug