Internationalization isn't something I've really had to deal with before. Trust Greg Dean to force my hand.

For most of my hosted sites, it's not an issue. The templating is entirely under the creators' control, so if they want to be in French, German, Canadian, or whatever, then most of the work is just making sure that their templates are in the right language.

However, parts of the site that are "functional" (registration/log-in, forums, etc), tend to be auto-generated, and that's where problems start.

I have some ideas of how to get this working on a larger basis, and have done the minimal research to get an idea of what best practices are. The big thing with the launch of Greg's german site, was that I had to have timestamps, for both his strips and his rants to auto-generate in the right language.

Luckily, at some point in the past couple of years, I had decided to standardize all my date manipulation on the perl DateTime module. This was great when I started setting Greg up initially, and also when Dave Kellett moved over, because midnight too these Californians (for comic updating) is apparently a few hours off from my east coast sensibilities.

DateTime also has built in, and easy, support for Locales. I had already started to throw together support for that, knowing that whatever solution I ended up with would have some basis in that area, but little did I know that a simple function call, right when my "site" variables are being created would automatically make all dates show up correctly for all page rendering.

It's so nice when something that looks to be a pain in the ass just suddenly "works". And more importantly, let's me delay implementing all the other hard bits for another day.