SEO-conform Multilingual URLs + Language Selector Widget (i18n)

thank you, the tutorial is very clear!

Yeah the problem was, my htaccess-file was replaced by my Aptana with a simple "deny from all". I replaced this wrong htaccess with the one I posted on #7173 and now everything works fine :)

hmm.. that is strange.. I tried to reproduce the error: I get Error 404 : Unable to resolve the request "de/contact" when I delete the rule that matches this url, namely:

'<language:(de|tr|en)>/<action:(contact|login|logout)>/*' => 'site/<action>',

which tells the application to actually call site/contact.

Can you confirm the following two points:

• You have a file .htaccess in your main application directory with the content

RewriteEngine on

# if a directory or a file exists, use it directly
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d

# otherwise forward it to index.php
RewriteRule . index.php

so that your urls do not contain any 'index.php' or similar...

• When the first rule in your rules array is

'rules'=>array(
    '<action:(contact|login|logout)>/*' => 'site/<action>',...
)

then the url somthing.com/contact opens the contact page.

I actually simply made Copy&Paste. My config.php has this:

'urlManager'=>array(
            'class'=>'application.components.UrlManager',
 
            'urlFormat'=>'path',
 
            'showScriptName'=>false,
 
            'urlSuffix'=>'.htm',
 
            'rules'=>array(
 
'<language:(de|tr|en)>/' => 'site/index',
 
'<language:(de|tr|en)>/<action:(contact|login|logout)>/*' => 'site/<action>',
 
'<language:(de|tr|en)>/<controller:\w+>/<id:\d+>'=>'<controller>/view',
 
'<language:(de|tr|en)>/<controller:\w+>/<action:\w+>/<id:\d+>'=>'<controller>/<action>',
 
'<language:(de|tr|en)>/<controller:\w+>/<action:\w+>/*'=>'<controller>/<action>',
            ),
        ),

And no, "/de/site/page/view/about" leads to a 404 too.

Still thanks for your attention so far ;)

A little update: If i say "'showScriptName'=>true" its working! But it doesnt look to good with "index.php/de/something.htm" if you find the reason i'd be glad to read from you =)

And another Update: To all of you with same problem, check your .htaccess! It has to look like this:

Options +FollowSymLinks
IndexIgnore */*
RewriteEngine on
 
# if a directory or a file exists, use it directly
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
 
# otherwise forward it to index.php
RewriteRule . index.php

Mine is working fine now, thx to c@cba!

I'm not sure where the problem could be, without more information.
How do your rules of the urlManager (in config/main.php) look like?
Does the rule that applies to "/de/site/page/view/about" direct the application to the correct controller/action?

Hm... sounds really nice, but I get 404 Errors when implementing this... Not even an error of an missing view, but totally 404. If I disable the pathformat it "works" (I have the language-parameter). Any Idea why?

My Urls look like this:

/de/site/page/view/about

/de/contact

Thank you for your encouraging words and for the tip!

Great tutorial c@cba! Straight to the point and well explained.

If we prefer to display only the other available languages, and not the current one that is used, we could slightly modify languageSelector.php into:

if(sizeof($languages) < 4) {
    $i=1;
    // Render options as links
    foreach($languages as $key=>$lang) {
        if($key != $currentLang) {
            echo CHtml::link(
                 $lang, 
                 $this->getOwner()->createMultilanguageReturnUrl($key));
            if(++$i < count($languages)) echo ' | ';
        }
    }
} else {
  (…)
  // no change here, the dropdown will contain all languages
}

This happened to me, when I didn't have the rules in the right order. They should be in the following order:

'<language:(de|tr|en)>/<country:\w+>/<location:\w+>/<action:(contact|login|logout)>/*' => 'site/<action>',
'<country:\w+>/<location:\w+>/<action:(contact|login|logout)>/*' => 'site/<action>',
'<action:(contact|login|logout)>/*' => 'site/<action>',

The following order leads to the problem you mentioned:

'<action:(contact|login|logout)>/*' => 'site/<action>',
'<country:\w+>/<location:\w+>/<action:(contact|login|logout)>/*' => 'site/<action>',
'<language:(de|tr|en)>/<country:\w+>/<location:\w+>/<action:(contact|login|logout)>/*' => 'site/<action>',

Keep in mind: Yii checks the rules for matching patterns, starting from the beginning. As soon as something is matched, Yii doesn't look further.

To make sure: are the country and locations names, controller names? Is '/en/spain/barcelona' for example supposed to call the controller Spain.php? The above approach does not work, if you want translation in controller and action names. If you want the action name 'publictransport' translated to spanish for example, you need a different solution. This article could be helpful.

Thank you so much for giving me a hand with this. I applied your code but I am not sure if it is working the right way. When I click on spanish for example it directs to: /site/index/language/es/country/espana/location/barcelona and before it was not like that it was /es/ without /site/index/languages and then if I click English it goes to the same link and doesn't translate. Do you have any idea how to solve this.

And btw for example I want to create a page about public transport let's say in spain/barcelona, then the have to create a module and an action for example /spain/barcelona/publictransport/?

Thanks again for your help!

Symon

The following should work:
1. Change the method createMultilanguageReturnUrl():

public function createMultilanguageReturnUrl($lang='en', $country='spain', $location='barcelona'){
    if (count($_GET)>0){
        $arr = $_GET;
        $arr['language']= $lang;
        $arr['country'] = Yii::t('locations', $country, array(), null, $arr['language']);
        $arr['location'] = Yii::t('locations', $location, array(), null, $arr['language']);
    }
    else {
        $arr = array(
            'language'=>$lang, 
            'country'=>Yii::t('locations', $country, array(), null, $arr['language']),
            'location'=>Yii::t('locations', $location, array(), null, $arr['language']),
        );
    }
    if($lang == 'en') unset($arr['language']); 
 
    return $this->createUrl('', $arr);
}

2. Edit the rules in the config file, for every page, there should be two versions:

'<language:(de|tr)>/<country:\w+>/<location:\w+>/<action:(contact|login|logout)>/*' => 'site/<action>',
'<country:\w+>/<location:\w+>/<action:(contact|login|logout)>/*' => 'site/<action>',

3. In UrlManager.php, the mothod createUrl() should be like:

public function createUrl($route,$params=array(),$ampersand='&')
{
    if (!isset($params['country'])) $params['country'] = Yii::t('locations','spain');
    if (!isset($params['location'])) $params['location'] = Yii::t('locations','barcelona');
    return parent::createUrl($route, $params, $ampersand);
}

4. Create the file protected/messages/de/locations.php with the content:

<?php
return array(
    'spain'=>'spanien',
    'barcelona'=>'barcelona',
);
?>

Under protected/messages, you'll need a directory for each language of your application with the same file containig the relative translations of course.

Hope this helps.
Best regards...

Thank you so much it works like a charm. I am quite new to Yii but learning a lot this way. Because I would like to load the content for a certain language, so they click on spanish and the pages show the spanish content and now I think I am able to do that.

Because I am quite new to this I have a question regarding the URL and params, now with the language there I would also like to add locations and cities so for spanish the url could look something like: /es/espana/barcelona and english would stay /spain/barcelona (countries and locations loaded from DB) do I have to set this up in the config and the syntax would be something similar to the language?

Thanks!

Hi Symon, thanks for the encouragement.
I just tested the following, and it did wirk for me:
1. First I discarded all the code where I check and adopt the language in session and/or cookie. Because you want the language to be english if the user enters .com/contact and the language is not part of the url.
If there would be a cookie with language='de', the above code would use it to render the page .com/contact in german anyway.

2. Add the following line to the method createMultilanguageReturnUrl($lang='en') in Controller.php, just before the return line:

if($lang == 'en') unset($arr['language']);

3. The mothod __construct in Controller.php should look like this:

public function __construct($id,$module=null){
        parent::__construct($id,$module);
        if(isset($_POST['language'])) {
            $lang = $_POST['language'];
            $this->redirect($_POST[$lang]);
        }
        if(isset($_GET['language'])) {
            Yii::app()->language = $_GET['language'];
        }
        else Yii::app()->language = 'en';
    }

4. You can discard the class UrlManager completely. Or you can just comment out all the code for testing (except return parent::createUrl($route, $params, $ampersand);), and if everything works for sure, just delete the file and remove this corresponding line in the config file:
'class'=>'application.components.UrlManager',

5. In your config file, for each rule prefixed with <language:(de|tr|en)>/, you should have the same rule without the prefix. It should look something like this (note that <language:(de|tr|en) is now <language:(de|tr)):

'rules'=>array(
    '<language:(de|tr)>/' => 'site/index',
    '<language:(de|tr)>/<controller:\w+>/<id:\d+>'=>'<controller>/view',
    '<language:(de|tr)>/<controller:\w+>/<action:\w+>/*'=>'<controller>/<action>',
    '' => 'site/index',
    '<controller:\w+>/<id:\d+>'=>'<controller>/view',
    '<controller:\w+>/<action:\w+>/*'=>'<controller>/<action>',
),

This should hopefully work...

Thank you, I was looking for a way to work with multiple languages and this works out great. I just have a question:

I would like to show my site in English if they hit the .com and for example in Spanish if the click on Spanish which in the URL would be com/es. In the Spanish site if they click the English language it goes to the .com again without language. How would I be able to do that with this script?

Thanks, keep up the good work!

Symon