[Question transposed from Slack]
We are trying to create a site with a virtualFolder of /chr. When we navigate to home page in the site, the system redirects us back to the site root. We have checked aliases, mod_rewrite/helicon ape/urlRewrite, and ignoreUrlPrefixes and all that stuff to no avail.
We have noticed the following works with no issue:
Does anyone have any idea what is going on here?
Props to @rosscartwright, @cassidydotdk, and @jammykam for getting us to the answer at lightning speed and for the helpful links.
The issue was a feature of Sitecore called AlwaysStripLanguage that is controlled by a Sitecore Setting in the Language group that controls the activation of a processor in the <preprocessRequest /> pipeline called Sitecore.Pipelines.PreprocessRequest.StripLanguage.
Turns out that this component will not only remove URL prefixes it recognises as a language registered on the site (in /sitecore/system/Languages), but it will respond to any code that maps to a culture known to Windows.
For a list of the known culture codes check this ISO 639-2 Language Code List - you will notice that in our case the issue was the Cherokee language.
There is also an article on Sitecore Community - Prevent the Sitecore ASP.NET CMS from Interpreting URL Path Prefixes as Language Names that is a port of an old article by @JohnWest.
In our case we have replaced the default processor with a new one that only removes a language if it is configured in the list of languages for the site. Note that as it states in John's article, these processors run before there is a site context as the Site Resolver is in the httpRequestBegin pipeline that runs later. Mileage will vary - build yourself a solution that suits your use case.
I will upload our solution to the Sitecore Marketplace in due course so if you're looking for it, have a poke around in there.
