Generating Web Pages in Multiple Languages with a PHP IP-to-Country Mapping Application

Introduction

Undeniably, an IP-to-country mapping program is a great add-on for web sites that need to deliver their contents in a multi-lingual platform. However, building an application like this with PHP (or with any other programming language) can be a challenging task, particularly for those PHP programmers making their first steps into the terrain of professional web development.

Now that you're aware of the subject covered by this group of articles, it's time to quickly review the previous tutorial. In that particular article I explained how to take advantage of the functionality of the "iptocountry" mapping MySQL table, in order to build a couple of simple PHP applications.

In that specific case, these applications were capable of determining from which countries users were accessing a sample web page, based on their corresponding IP addresses. The first of these programs was developed by using a procedural approach, while the second one was constructed by mean of the object-oriented paradigm.

Nonetheless, having at our disposal this useful MySQL mapping table makes it much easier to build all sorts of IP-to-country applications. Based on this concept, in this third part of the series I'll be discussing how to dynamically generate web pages in distinct languages, something that can be particularly interesting if you're planning to deliver the contents of your web site in a multi-lingual fashion.

Thus, it's time to get rid of the preliminaries and start learning how to build these dynamic web pages with PHP. Let's get going!