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To any devs of a new Lemmy app... don't hardcode your app's strings! (lemm.ee)
submitted 2 years ago* (last edited 2 years ago) by to c/lemmyapps@lemmy.world
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This is applicable to almost any piece of software with text in it. When starting your new app, you should make sure you are using a separate language file for the strings in your app. This makes text reusable, and you can change it all in one place.

Once your app gains a community, if you did this, you can also get translators!

With Photon i made the massive mistake of hardcoding everything up until the app became massive, and my PR for un-hardcoding all the strings looks like this:

The amount of lines modified in the GitHub PR. 2,067 lines added, 1,082 removed.

It was worth it though! Because the community has translated it into 11 languages!

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[–] 2 points 2 years ago

for things like translation it is obviously required, but it will be ongoing as the app changes over the years

so it's just about realising that text in the UI is just another kind of content that has to be managed so there will need to be infrastructure and process to make that easier

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