GotText is a translation engine for PHP 7. It can be used instead of gettext, but it's not a drop-in replacement. The main goal of this project is to build a translation engine with gettext features but without any gettext shortcomings. GotText solves most of the fundamental problems of using gettext in PHP and also has an extra functionality on top.
GotText is fully documented and can be built at least on Debian, Ubuntu and CentOS.
Binary releases for Ubuntu can be found here.