Human-friendly URLs for a multilingual Joomla! site (jdlh.com)
Posted by Jim DeLaHunt on 05 Mar 2008 at 04:00 pm | Tagged as: CMS, Joomla, multilingual
I want my site, jdlh.com, to be a multilingual site that communicates the business I want to do and lets me explore the tools for being world-ready. For nearly two years, I’ve worked to get a combination of tools that would do the job. I’m happy to say that this week I finally assembled a plausible solution. The final piece was sh404SEF, after some patching, with Joomla! 1.0.x and Joom!Fish.
Language support on jdlh.com
jdlh.com supports content in multiple languages (English, Japanese, and German so far), and also a user interface in multiple languages (the same three now, but could differ). Each URL can include a language code between the domain name (“jdlh.com”) and the path to the content. The language codes look like “/en/” for English, “/de/” for German, and “/ja/” for Japanese. The codes are based on RFC 3066 . Where there is a language code in a URL, the site presents content localised for that language, to the extent possible. The content may not always available in that language, so the site may present the content in a fall-back language.
Where there is no language code in a URL, especially in the basic domain name http://jdlh.com/, the site looks at the HTTP Accept-Language header to determine which language the user prefers, and redirects the browser to content with that language code.
It’s important to me that the URLs of content on my site be concise, comprehensible to humans, and stable over time. I like Jakob Nielsen’s “URL as UI†column, and the W3C’s “Cool URIs don’t change“, and try to follow them.
Software used on jdlh.com
jdlh.com is built using Joomla!, a free software content management system (CMS). Version 1.0.x of Joomla!, which I use as of early 2008, can be coaxed into using UTF-8 text encoding and tolerating multi-lingual content. I add in Joom!Fish, a Joomla component which helps manage content in multiple parallel languages, and provides useful language utilities like that UI widget at the top of the page, to select between languages.
Joomla has many strengths, but easy-to-read URLs aren’t among them. Left to itself, a Joomla URL is an opaque stream of numbers and codes. Turning those URLs into human-friendly URLs, which are concise, comprehensible to humans, and stable over time is the work of a “SEF” (Search-Engine-Friendly) component. Joomla has had several, but the first which satisifed us for jdlh.com is one called sh404SEF (see also sh404SEF on Joomla extensions and sh404SEF on siliana.net).
There has been a tough interaction between Joomla, Joom!Fish, and sh404SEF (and its ill-starred predecessors). Since mid-2006, Joomla would work with either of the other two, but not both together. Even as Joomla! moved forward to version 1.5.x, which has a better foundation for multilingual sites, I was held back to Joomla 1.0.x because Joom!Fish didn’t support the new version yet. Finally, in late February 2008, I discovered version 1.3.1 “TEST PR build 255” of sh404SEF, which seemed to work well with Joom!Fish (currently 1.8.2) and Joomla (currently 1.0.15).
I made a patch to sh404SEF, one of the modules that extends the Joomla! content management system that runs this website. What the patch does is to ensure that all three of the languages supported on this website are treated equally in the URLs of this site. Without the patch, the “/en/” tag for URLs of English-language content would be missing in some cases. See my article “Default-language patch for sh404SEF published” for a description of the patch, and a link to the code.
[…] I’ll be presenting in a 15-minute “Project Spotlight” session at 11:25h. If my presentation had a title, it would be “jdlh.com: a multilingual Joomla site (with human-friendly URLs too)“. The abstract: It’s straightforward to make a Joomla! site in any one language. Having multiple languages at once takes special tricks. Keeping the URLs friendly for humans and search engines demands more tricks. Vancouver consultant Jim DeLaHunt spotlights his site, jdlh.com. It operates in English, Japanese, and German. It uses Joomla! 1.0.x, Joom!Fish and sh404SEF. Joomla! 1.5 and newcomer Nooku are working towards providing the same capabilities, but aren’t quite there yet. For more information, see my blog earlier in 2008, “Human-friendly URLs for a multilingual Joomla! site (jdlh.com)“. […]
[…] the Drupal core alone, it’s equal to Joomla! 1.0.x plus Joomfish plus sh404SEF (which is what I use now for jdlh.com). Add in the international module and its three companions, it looks comparable to what I think […]