Sitecore multilange portal and en "default" Language

Question

I've a multisite solution with de-de, es-es, de-ch, en ... languages I am using currently the default en language for my uk english site. I don't know if this is a good Idea?

And my current problem is here at the moment that I've disabled language writing by default and I've created a dedicated Role for Each Language to get write access like

Lang DE
Lang FR
Lang EN

for FR and DE it was no Problem to set the Language write rights but the EN Language is Protected to set here individual write Rights. Do you use the default en Language in your pages or do you create an expliciet language for each portal also for en?

Answer 1

It really depends on your decision. Personally, In case of a multilingual site, instead of using "en" language, we create the proper language for each site. e.g en-gb for UK, en-us for US.

Sitecore uses 'en' language for system settings related items.

Answer 2

By default "en" language item is protected and it is used/configured in all the Sitecore default sites like shell, login, modules-shell and modules-website.

<site name="shell" language="en" contentLanguage="en" .../>
<site name="login" language="en" .../>
<site name="modules_shell" language="en" .../>
<site name="modules_website" language="en" .../>

So when you unprotect and set Language write rights to a specific role then you are actually overwriting the Sitecore's inbuilt security.

For ex. If you create a Sitecore user with "Sitecore Developer" role then the default behavior is the user could able to edit the templates and items under system etc. But when you overwrite the security at "en" language item by enabling the language write only to a specific new role and restrict for "sitecore\Everyone" then all the Sitecore inbuilt security will be messed up. The Sitecore Developer user could not able to edit the templates. This is just a sample and there may be many scenarios where you will be overwriting the Sitecore inbuilt security/setup.

So if you are having any custom changes on top of "en" language item then I would suggest creating a new language like en-GB or en-US or anything relevant to your requirement and leave the default "en" item without any change.