I am currently designing a website for a company and use the CMS TypoLight. A really nice tool, I like it. It produces clean code and you can easily do Search Engine Optimisation (SEO). SEO is by the way still an important aspect in development of websites.
But I have one little problem: The website should handle multiple languages. This is generally possible with TypoLight, as you can have multiple site roots in one installation and discriminate the user according to language settings from his browser. This gives you the right entry point, but not search engine optimised.
There are different ways around to do the language switch and so on. You find them if you browse the extension directory for the tag "language". However this is only considering the switch from one language to another, at least in most cases. But what I want is a way to show on one hand the user, which languages he is using in the URL and on the other hand to the search engine, that it will index all my pages.
So after a short time of research, I have found different ways how I could implement this. The difficult one is, to build an own hook and somehow modify the routing with .htaccess. But this needs time and since I have never coded for TypoLight the outcome/sucess is uncertain.
The second options is a little bit "dirtier", but implemented fast. Every page can have an Alias. This alias, is in case two pages have the same name/title, the criteria after which the system looks.
For this implementation there are two "sub-options". Without any extension installed, you are not allowed to enter certain special character in the alias name. Allowed are, as far as I have found out: A-Z (upper- and lowercase), 0-9, Underscore (_) and "." (dot). Nothing much more. This gives you a narrow limit to your Aliases. But one option would be an URL like this:
domainname.com/index_en.html and domainname.com/index_de.html.
Well, looks ugly, but is useful.
A more sophisticated approach and this is where sub-option number two comes up, is something like:
domainname.com/en/index.html and domainname.com/de/index.html.
Looks much nicer and suggests the user that you are within a specified folder.
To realise this, you need the extension FolderURL, which enables you to enter Slashes (/) into the Alias field of your page. Simply enter there de/index (because you are not allowed to enter trailing or leading slashes) and the result will look like in the second example above.
The only bad thing in this solution is, that you need to enter it for every page manually. This means, if you have set up your tree already, you need to re-edit every element, which can take quite some time.
As I have read in an post on the developer wiki the next version is likely to have some kind of feature that I have made up here with my solution. Even better would be a kind of solution that Typo3 has, where you have just one page-tree and the content elements are translated individually.
http://www.typolight-community.de/showthread.php?t=1295
Grüße, Fabster
Dear Fabster
Thanks for the link and thanks for your hint with the "edit multiple" option. I did really not use this until now...
Good post mate!! Keep 'em flowing!
Hey even I did not know that it can be used in multiple languages. Searched for the option .. but never got it... N e ways.. Thanks for such an easy and valuable information.
Good subject for creating this post. It is interesting reading.
SEM is , in reality, pretty easy and your tips will surely help any Internet Marketing associate. Already bookmarked.
Great and useful method, I have been doing this with great results. Like anything else though you have to think outside the box.