Change Surname to Last Name

This article provides information on how to change the phrases "Surname" and "Surnames" to "Last Name" and "Last Names"

I did this to my TNG instance because:

I think the old term is out dated and has undertones of English historical customs which are irrlevant in the modern world
There is inconsistency in the app with the old and new terms being used interchangeably.

The change process is very simple and the app has been designed to protect the changes from being overwritten by updates, because changes are made to a file set aside for this sole purpose.

The following instructions are based on an English language installation. You will need to modify the folder and labels for other languages.

The custom phrases are entered in a file called "cust_text.php" located in:

<your TNG rootfolder>"\languages\English-UTF8 if your site is using UTF-8
<your TNG rootfolder>"\languages\English if your site is using ISO-8859-1 or ANSI

If there are entries in this file they will override the text label for each listed variable. It's also easier to reverse changes if the default values are not edited. So editing the main language files is NOT recommended.

To make the change, open the custom_text.php file in a plain text editor like Notepad++ or TextWrangler and update that file with the block of text shown below. Save the file and TNG will respond to the new values.

You can remove or comment out lines using // prefix to return values to its default.

Paul Barret

Custom text overrides added manually should be added below the following lines

//Mods should put their changes before this line, local changes should come after it.
//Put your own custom messages here, like this:
//$text['messagename'] = "This is the message";

// Change Surname to Last Name
$admtext['lastsurname'] = "Last Name";
$admtext['ucaselast'] = "Upper case all Last Names";
$admtext['topsurnames'] = "Top Last Names label";
$admtext['lnprefixes'] = "Last Name Prefixes (i.e., van, de)";
$admtext['lntogether'] = "Keep as part of regular Last Name";
$admtext['ucsurnames'] = "Uppercase All Last Names";
$admtext['lnprefix'] = "Last Name Prefix";
$admtext['oriental'] = "Last Name first (without commas)";
$admtext['lnfirst'] = "Last Name first (with commas)";
$text['surnamesstarting'] = "Show Last Names starting with";
$text['showallsurnames'] = "Show all Last Names";
$text['mainsurnamepage'] = "Main Last Name page";
$text['allsurnames'] = "All Last Names";
$text['showmatchingsurnames'] = "Click on a Last Name to show matching records.";
$text['allbeginningwith'] = "All Last Names beginning with";
$text['top30'] = "Top xxx Last Names";
$text['surnamesstarting'] = "Show Last Names starting with";
$text['showallsurnames'] = "Show all Last Names";
$text['mainsurnamepage'] = "Main Last Name page";
$text['allsurnames'] = "All Last Names";
$text['showmatchingsurnames'] = "Click on a Last Name to show matching records.";
$text['allbeginningwith'] = "All Last Names beginning with";
$text['top30'] = "Top xxx Last Names";
$text['totuniquesn'] = "Total Unique Last Names";
$text['nosurname'] = "[no Last Name]";
$text['surnamelist'] = "Last Name List";
$text['surnames'] = "Last Names";
$text['mnulastnames'] = "Last Names";
//  End of overrides for Surname