Lesson 1: Changing wording

This lesson expands your knowledge of Elgg's language system.

Problem

There is wording that you want to change. Elgg says 'comments', but you prefer 'responses'. Elgg says 'Register', but you prefer 'Sign up'. You may think that those changes involve editing lots of files, but the solution is much easier than that.

Solution

Remember the elgg_echo() function from last chapter that mapped strings such as 'hello:world' to the proper phrase in the user's language ("Hello, World!" in English, "¡Hola, Mundo!" in Spanish, and so on)? Besides providing translations, we can also take advantage of elgg_echo() to easily change wording. We do this by overriding the language mapping using a plugin.

Example

In this example, we will change the 'comment' language to 'response' language so that instead of displaying Post comment after a blog post like in the following screenshot:

It will display Post a response like the following screenshot:

Step 1: Create the plugin structure

Just as we...