Although there are many types of hostingHosting A web hosting service is a type of Internet hosting service that allows individuals and organizations to make their website accessible via the World Wide Web., most WordPress users use shared hosting, and some use VPSVPS A virtual private server (VPS) is a virtual machine sold as a service by an Internet hosting service. A VPS runs its own copy of an operating system (OS), and customers may have superuser-level access to that operating system instance, so they can install almost any software that runs on that OS. or Cloud hosting. Those who use VPS or Cloud usually manage their own servers and therefore decide the use of PHPPHP PHP (PHP: Hypertext Preprocessor) is a general-purpose scripting language especially suited to web development. PHP code is usually processed on a web server by a PHP interpreter. On a web server, the result of the interpreted and executed PHP code would form the whole or part of an HTTP response. extensions, but those who use shared hosting usually do not have that option.

A few weeks ago came to the Hosting Team a request to analyze the suitability of using the Internationalization PHP extension because, although the WordPress CoreCore Core is the set of software required to run WordPress. The Core Team builds WordPress. does not need it just now, partly because it is known that it is not recommended or mandatory, development teams do not use it because it is not there, and hosters do not install it because WordPress does not use it. It’s the fish that bites its own tail.

Deciding which ApacheApache Apache is the most widely used web server software. Developed and maintained by Apache Software Foundation. Apache is an Open Source software available for free. modules, which PHP extensions, which databaseDatabase A database is an organized collection of data. Access to this data is usually provided by a "database management system" (DBMS) consisting of an integrated set of computer software that allows users to interact with one or more databases and provides access to all of the data contained in the database. Because of the close relationship between them, the term "database" is often used casually to refer to both a database and the DBMS used to manipulate it. configuration or choice of cacheCache A cache is a component that stores data so that future requests for that data can be served faster; the data stored in a cache might be the result of an earlier computation or a copy of data stored elsewhere. is not something to be taken lightly.

Why is the PHP Intl extension important?

WordPress is a global, international software, with support for a multitude of languages and with infinite combinations. Approximately half of the installations are in a language that is not the default (English) and this leads us to think about localisms, transliteration, encoding conversions, calendar operations, collation … in short, everything you have with the different languages and formats that are around the planet. And this is what the PHP Intl extension provides.

What do we as a WordPress Community gain from this extension?

Above all, we gain the possibility to use a lot of functions that can make our life easier than developers and that would improve the way we develop to improve WordPress.

Functions like collator_compare will allow us to compare Unicode text strings; with numfmt_format we will be able to format a number according to the selected locale; the normalization of characters; the formatting of messages; to know which is the first day of the week according to the locale, without needing to ask the user for it.

And not only in functionality or ease, also to improve security, with functions such as Spoofchecker that can tell you if �?google.com’, �?goog1e.com’ can confuse the user, or functions related to Internet domains, both to convert an IDN domain to text and text to IDN.

Yes, you may well think that WordPress already does many of these things, but in many cases it does them using hacks that could now be deprecated and used natively.

Hosting Team Recommendation

Taking into account that WordPress continues to grow, the Hosting Team has considered a good recommendation, but not an obligation, for all hostings that work with WordPress the possibility of offering this extension, by default, to all users.

Also, we open discussion to all hosters and also the Core Team and Plugins Team.

+make.wordpress.org/core/
+make.wordpress.org/plugins/
+make.wordpress.org/updates/