CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

I want to customise just a few strings that are being passed through the 'ts' function.

Ideally, I'd do something like in Drupal where for ad-hoc string customisations you can add entries into the settings.php file.

At this point, I've created an entirely new translation with just the one entry which has been a lot of work getting it into the correct format. And on upgrade, unless I remember, I'm likely to lose this 'translation'.

Is there a better way?

Hi demeritcowboy,

Thanks for the pointer. Unfortunately, the word replacement doesn't seem to work for my use case.

I'm trying to replace the error string "This email %1 is already registered. Please select another email." with something more helpful, eg. "It looks like you already have an account with us registered with the email address %1.  <a href=\"/user/password\">Click here to request a new password</a> and login before proceeding."

I tried entering the original string and the replacement, but the original string wasn't being substituted.

I *can* do this by creating a new translation, eg, en_CUSTOM but it seems very heavy handed (and in our case, prone to being deleted next upgrade of civi).

We should also consider fixing core to improve those error messages in general. It's a small change, but I think it would benefit to CiviCRM's usability.

I recommend against using custom .po files, because they are difficult to upgrade to future civicrm versions. The site either gets stuck with its old .po file (and then new strings are not included), or re-patch the .po on upgrades, or gettext merge strings on upgrade. At that point, you may as well patch core, it's the same, but less fiddling around.

Another option is to use a custom translation function and to implement your known string replacements. Although, as Erik said, might be better to find why it's not working to beginning with, the code for ts() mostly in CRM/Core/I18n.php, see function crm_translate().