Whats possible, switching default language on existing sites

[olafgleba]

Hi,

there is a (not so small) company website. On launch the default website language was adapted to german ("/"),- with english ("/en/") and chinese ("/zh/") as additions. After merging with another company, the default website language now has to be english ("/") and the other languages as addition ("/de/", "/zh/").  

There are several valuable posts about how to change the default language when set up a installation. 

But unfortunately i can't find any approach to change the default language on existing multilingual sites. Which is not uncommon practice, i suppose. Am i right,- still the only way/approach in PW to handle this is rebuilding the whole page content from scratch?

Hard to explain to clients...

cheers
Olaf

 

 

[Gideon So]

Hi @olafgleba

If you are talking about the language when a visitor first visit the site. Take a look at the following. I have just changed the default language of my site.

https://processwire.recipes/recipes/change-homepages-default-language/

Gideon

[olafgleba]

Hi @Gideon So,

thanks, yes, i tried that and it works. Still it feels a bit awkward linking to the main homepage address like https://foo.bar becoming https://foo.bar/en/ in the browser. You lose hierarchy as there are only language segments then. 

cheers, Olaf

[monollonom]

After searching on the forum I stumbled upon this thread which seems to have the best attempts at doing what you’re trying to achieve:

Maybe you could try one of these solutions?

[olafgleba]

Hi @monollonom,

thank you for posting the thread.

Editing the language section is the more easy part when changing the default language. If you have plenty of multilingual content, then it gets hard eventually. Therefore, having such a good starting point thanks to @gebeer , e.g. his php script to swap content of language tabs,- this whatever makes it worth the effort.

I mostly work on multilingual sites/projects, so this affects me regularly,- its a pity PW doesn't handle this more smoothly. Like other CMF do.