Languages and countries (as dialects)

[ceberlin]

I have a very tricky problem....

My languages appear into separate trees and not in languagesfields within a page.

Now:

/en/page1

/en/page2

...

/es/page1

/es/page2

Now I need to separate languages in dialects as a tool to be able to address local content for countries on certain pages.

Solution 1?

/en-UK/page1

/en-UK/page1

/en-US/page1

/en-US/page1

...

/es/page1

/es/page2

This would be a technical clean solution - but editors would need to duplicate every change that is common for a language 

to all dialects pages. So this does not work. (All content is the same appart from a few exceptions)

Solution 2?

/en/UK/page1

/en/UK/page1

/en/US/page1

/en/US/page1

...

/es/page1

/es/page2

We thought of making /US/ and /UK/ are segments from the page /en/.

A segment would make it possible to bookmark the dialect setting.

There would be only a language tree /en/ and the dialect /UK/ would change the content slightly by the API, like returning a different support phone number.

Is it possible to have a segment element in the middle of a path? Looks like it's not...

Or is there a different way to archive this?

[Soma]

Good luck, we also have had projects in the past with lots of languages and en us version (not with PW) and it's a pain no matter what CMS. Often they don't really serve texts for each dialect specific, it's often just for a phone number or little text here and there. Annoying.

Hard to decide what makes most sense without knowing the project in detail.

Without thinking a lot maybe..

/en/page1/

/en/page2/

/es/page1/

/es/page2/

 

..and have root home page urlSegments turned on.

 

..then construct your links 

 

/en-us/page1/

/en-us/page2/

/en-uk/page1/

/en-uk/page2/

/es/page1/

/es/page2/

 

if a url solves to a page that already exists PW will render the page itself, otherwise the path end up as urlsSegments in your home ( or urlSegmentsStr I think in 2.3.1 dev only)

 

and in the home template have code to read urlsegments and load and render a specific page.

/en-us/page1/ and /en-uk/page1/ mapping to /en/page1/ :

if(count($input->urlSegments)){
    // we have url segment(s)

    if($input->urlSegment1 == "en-us") {
        $input->setUrlSegment(1, "en");
        $dialect = 'us';
    } elseif($input->urlSegment1 == "en-uk"){
        $input->setUrlSegment(1, "en");
        $dialect = 'uk';
    }

    $p = $pages->get("/".$input->urlSegmentStr."/"); 

    // if url didn't resolve to a page show the 404 page
    if(!$p->id) throw new Wire404Exception(); 

    // render the page and give it a $options['dialect']
    echo $p->render(array('dialect' => $dialect));
} else {
    // output your home page ...
}

In page that are rendered this way will have the dialect set in $options['dialect'], which you could use to output different address or phone number.

Maybe I'm missing something and written in the browser so take it with a grain of salt.

[ceberlin]

Hi Soma, thanks for your ideas.  Yeah, really tricky. 

Right now I am trying to avoid this by using cookies and sessions to remember the country settings and let PW only handle the basic languages, as before.

Maybe I have a use for segments on single pages that need to do special things , like the contact pages.

I am curious how far I come with that.