Finland is a
country with three official languages, and many organizations
here want to provide their websites in multilingual format.
While Midgard CMS
supports storing
multilingual content in same content tree, this is still
not widely used. A far more common strategy is to use
language prefix URLs.
With language prefixes each translation of a site has its own
content tree starting from the language name, or 2-letter code.
This has the advantage of allowing slightly different content
structure to be presented on different translations. For
example, a company might want to present products differently
to the domestic and international markets. It also makes it
easy to tell what language the content behind a link is in.
To make a
MidCOM site multilingual there are two steps.
First,
set up the website normally. Then log into the AIS interface and create
top-level topics for each language you want to have on your
site. It doesn't matter what component is used to drive those
topics, but very often it is de.linkm.taviewer. The
URL name of the topics should be the two letter country code.
The top-level country topics are actually the front pages of
different language versions of the site. The site structure can
be created freely under them, although it would be recommended
to make the site structure quite identical between languages.
Then you have to make MidCOM aware of the
language topics. This is done by creating a configuration
snippet (/sitegroup-config/midcom-template/config) for
the MidCOM Site Template.
Log into
Aegir and go to the Snippets tab. There you should
create a sitegroup-config top-level directory to the
same
sitegroup where the site is in. Then create a
midcom-template snippet directory under that. In this
directory you can place the configuration PHP code in a
config snippet.
Configure the languages used on the site:
// Languages enabled on the site, and information about them
// in format "URL prefix" => "Language code"
$GLOBALS["midcom_site"]["site_languages_array"] = array(
"fi" => "fi", // Finnish
"en" => "en", // English
"ge" => "ka" // Georgian
);
// Default language
$midcom_site["default_language"] = "en";
$midcom_site["site_language"] = $GLOBALS["midcom_site"]["site_languages_array"][$midcom_site["default_language"]];
Set MidCOM's language based on the URL prefix:
if ($_MIDGARD["self"] == $GLOBALS["midcom_site"]["uri"])
{
// On-site language
if ($_MIDGARD["argc"] > 0
&& array_key_exists($_MIDGARD["argv"][0],$GLOBALS["midcom_site"]["site_languages_array"]))
{
$GLOBALS["midcom_site"]['site_language'] = $GLOBALS["midcom_site"]["site_languages_array"][$_MIDGARD["argv"][0]];
}
}
elseif ($_MIDGARD["self"] == $GLOBALS["midcom_site"]["uri"]."midcom-admin/ais/")
{
// AIS language
if ($_MIDGARD["argc"] > 0)
{
foreach ($GLOBALS["midcom_site"]["site_languages_array"] as $prefix => $code)
{
$language_topic = mgd_get_topic_by_name($GLOBALS["midcom_site"]["root_topic"]->id,$prefix);
if ($language_topic
&& ($language_topic->id == $_MIDGARD["argv"][0]
|| mgd_is_in_topic_tree($language_topic->id, $argv[0])))
{
$GLOBALS["midcom_site"]['site_language'] = $code;
}
}
}
}
This is all needed to make a site multilingual. With this setup
the root URL of the site can be used for a splash screen
presented to users for selecting language.
As an option, you can also utilize HTTP
Language Negotiation for automatically directing the user
to correct language version of the site. To do this, add the
following to the midcom-template config snippet:
// Language negotiation
if ($_MIDGARD["uri"] == $GLOBALS["midcom_site"]["uri"])
{
if ($_SERVER[HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE])
{
$langstr = explode(',',$_SERVER[HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE]);
if (is_array($langstr))
{
foreach ($langstr as $language)
{
$language = substr($language,0,2);
if (array_key_exists($language,$GLOBALS["midcom_site"]["site_languages_array"]))
{
header("Location: ".$GLOBALS["midcom_site"]["uri"].$language."/");
exit;
}
}
}
}
// No language preferences matched, go to default language
header("Location: ".$GLOBALS["midcom_site"]["uri"].$GLOBALS["midcom_site"]['default_language']."/".$suffix);
exit;
}
Date output in MidCOM is tied to the site
language, and uses PHP strftime() function for
output. For this to work your server must have the locale you
need installed on Unix level. On Debian the locales can be
installed via the following command:
/usr/sbin/dpkg-reconfigure locales
Select the locales you need from the list and they will be
installed by dpkg.
Updated 2005-09-27:
This tutorial is now maintained in
the Midgard Wiki.
