Multiple Languages per site, not persistant language

Question

I was wondering if anybody knows how to set up a multilingual site that switches languages but doesnt make the language switch persistent.

So I want www.mysite.com to show the english page and www.mysite.com/sv-se to show the Swedish. But if I visit www.mysite.com/page after visiting a Swedish page it should show the English (default) page again.

If I set the languageEmbedding="always" I am halfway there, but I cant figure out how to disable the content language change from being persistent.

Any ideas appreciated.

Answer 1

Try the following solution:

We need to override Sitecore.Pipelines.PreprocessRequest.StripLanguage

using Sitecore.Diagnostics;
using Sitecore.Globalization;
using Sitecore.Web;
using System.Web;
using Sitecore;
using Sitecore.Pipelines.PreprocessRequest;

namespace YourProject
{
public class StripLanguage : Sitecore.Pipelines.PreprocessRequest.StripLanguage
{
    /// <summary>Processes the specified arguments.</summary>
    /// <param name="args">The arguments.</param>
    public override void Process(PreprocessRequestArgs args)
    {
        Assert.ArgumentNotNull((object)args, "args");

        Language language = StripLanguage.ExtractLanguage(args.Context.Request);
        if (language == (Language) null)
        {
            //if url doesn't contain language name, we will set the default language
            language = Sitecore.Globalization.Language.Parse("en");
        }
        Context.Language = language;
        Context.Data.FilePathLanguage = language;
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Extracts the language from the file path of the current request.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="request">The HTTP request.</param>
    /// <returns>The language.</returns>
    private static Language ExtractLanguage(HttpRequest request)
    {
        Assert.ArgumentNotNull((object)request, "request");
        string languageName = WebUtil.ExtractLanguageName(request.FilePath);
        if (string.IsNullOrEmpty(languageName))
            return (Language)null;
        Language result;
        if (!Language.TryParse(languageName, out result))
            return (Language)null;
        return result;
    }
}
}

Then you need to replace the Sitecore's StripLanguage with your implementation. Add the following CustomStripLanguageProcessor.config file into the include folder:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration xmlns:patch="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/" xmlns:set="http://www.sitecore.net/xmlconfig/set/">
  <sitecore>
    <!--Pipelines-->
    <pipelines>
      <preprocessRequest>
        <processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.PreprocessRequest.StripLanguage, Sitecore.Kernel" >
          <patch:delete/>
        </processor>
        <processor type="YourProject.StripLanguage, YourProject" />
      </preprocessRequest>
    </pipelines>
  </sitecore>
</configuration>

Now, when your url have the /sv-se/ , the Swedish language will be set as a context language. But if it is not, the default language will be used.

Answer 2

One way to solve this could be by placing a custom processor in the httpRequestBegin pipeline after the LanguageResolver (<processor type="Sitecore.Pipelines.HttpRequest.LanguageResolver, Sitecore.Kernel"/>). You let Sitecore resolve the language first, and you switch the language based on your custom business rules - in this case that rule should be that if the url did not contain a language the language should always be English.

Don't forget to check in your custom resolver that the url is not a Sitecore url, you don't want to mess with those.

But: if you really have urls with and without language, you should also think about duplicate content. So you should actually redirect those pages to a url with the language included or at least put a canonical url in the head.

If you would decide to redirect, another option could be to use the IIS rewrite module. You could create a rule that checks if

• the url begins with /en/ or /sv-se/ (one of the languages allowed)
• and is not a media request or a Sitecore related request

and redirect that to a url with /en/ in front...