Change Language Files

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ABOUT LANGUAGE FILES

Other Language Packs are available to download - currently Spanish, German, Dutch and Russian - the links to find them on GitHub are shown in the README file of the Phoenix download - download and install now if required.

Changes to language files can be made to localise and personalise the shop to suit you.

Let's first explain a little about the basic working mechanics of Phoenix.

On the demo website look in the page footer and click the Privacy & Cookie Policy link.

This will open the page - you will see that this page is generated by a file named privacy.php - this is shown in your browser address bar.

This file contains all the code to make the page display as it does and you would not normally change anything in it - it is the mechanics so don't touch it unless you know what you're doing or you will break things!

In the code there will be a reference to the text you see on the page - just a code for each different piece of text.

In this case there are 3 pieces of text so there are 3 codes - NAVBAR_TITLE for the text that shows in the breadcrumb, HEADING_TITLE for the text that shows in the page title and TEXT_INFORMATION for the main text.

The codes for each piece of text are defined in a statement in a corresponding language file.

For example, the defines for the text you see will be found in the file found in includes/languages/english/privacy.php.

Notice that the language file has the same name as the corresponding main page file.

You can find and open this language file from admin go to Tools → Define Languages and look for privacy.php in the list.

Click to open it and look for the defines - in this case there will be 3 defines showing as

define('NAVBAR_TITLE', 'Privacy Notice');
define('HEADING_TITLE', 'Privacy Notice');
define('TEXT_INFORMATION', 'Put here your Privacy Notice information.');

The text will show between two single quotes e.g.

'Put here your Privacy Notice information.'

Now you have the language file open, change the text between the single quotes and click save.

Open the website page again to see your changes or if you still have the page open, refresh or reload the page to see the changes.

Only ever change the text between the quotes - be sure not to delete one of the quotes by mistake or you will break things!.

Just about every page and module in Phoenix will work this way and have it's own corresponding language file.

The exceptions are the main language files named english.php, there is one for the admin and one for the shop, which control text for many different pages.

All of the text can be changed in those define statements to personalise the text or messages displayed.

So remember - you can change anything in a language file define statement between those two quotes.

IMPORTANT: If you enter any more quotes in your text, you must use a backslash before the quote e.g. don\'t or you will confuse the system and break things!

At this stage your shop is probably ready to go live but Phoenix can be customised in every way.

The next steps show a few common ways that shop owners customise the shop.

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