Avoid hardcoding strings html

Question

How should I go about avoiding hardcoding Strings in HTML code?

e.g:

<h1>Website name</h1>

So that they can be easily changed globally across the site from one location.

Answer 1

You could create separete html files with each lang, but I prefer to use another things as:

PHP:

$lang = array();

$lang['PAGE_TITLE'] = 'My website page title';
$lang['HEADER_TITLE'] = 'My website header title';
$lang['SITE_NAME'] = 'My Website';
$lang['SLOGAN'] = 'My slogan here';
$lang['HEADING'] = 'Heading';

More info for this custom method here: http://www.bitrepository.com/php-how-to-add-multi-language-support-to-a-website.html

or:

function lang($phrase){
    static $lang = array(
        'NO_PHOTO' => 'No photo\'s available',
        'NEW_MEMBER' => 'This user is new'
    );
    return $lang[$phrase];
}

echo lang('no_photo');

(from: Most efficient way to do language file in PHP?)

Without reinventing the wheel: http://php.net/gettext

Or with javascript: Best practice javascript and multilanguage

If you use some framework (either PHP or javascript) they usually have their own multilanguage supoort (laravel, angular, zend...)

Hope it helps!