Every trip, location and photograph has a description. The description is a humanly-readable text. Internationalization is supported by allowing the description to be specified in many different languages, and showing only the appopriate one based on the preferences of the user. For example, you could say that the photograph "DSC002312.JPG" has the following description:
Descriptions are only needed for trips and loctions; photographs don't need to have one as sometimes it is very tiresome to have a title for every single photograph that you took.
When specifying a description, you can say that it applies to a specific language using the international code for that language (for example, "es" for Spanish, "en" for English, etc..) or you can say that it applies for any language. For example, if you are displaying the photograph of some exotic insect and want to use its scientific (latin) name as a description, there is no need to copy the text for every single language you want to support.
Sometimes JPBlog allows you to specify a complete file to be used as a description. For example, you could want to use an extended description with images and links for a location. In this case, you can specify different file names for each posible language that you wish to support.
Some pages in JPBlog have a single version that is used for all languages. In these cases, the texts that appear in these pages are externalized, meaning that they are stored in external files. So, instead of a literal text like this:
Thumbnail size : <select name="thumbnail">
You will see this instead:
<photo:msg id='thumbnail-size' /> <select name='thumbnail'>
The "thumbnail-size" is a message key (or message name) that is looked up in a set of files called message resources. There is one such file per language, and all these files have the form <root-name>_<language-code>.properties, where the root-name is configurable in the JPBlog configuration file. If you have specified the root name to be "messages", then you must have a messages_es.properties file with the text of all messages in Spanish, a messages_en.properties file with the text of all messages in English, etc. At least one such file must exist, with the default language for your site.
The structure of these files is very simple : they are text files specifying pairs of (message-name, message text) in each line. For example, for the messages in english you would have:
thumbnail-size = Thumbnail size thumbnail-small = Small thumbnail-medium = Medium
and then for the same messages in spanish you would have:
thumbnail-size = Tamaño de imagen thumbnail-small = Pequeña thumbnail-medium = Media