Change language without ?language=English in URL

criat · November 15, 2013

Hello,

I use flags instead of language names in my WHMCS, and the code looks like this:

<a href="{$smarty.server.PHP_SELF}?language=english"><img src="en-flag.png"/></a>
<a href="{$smarty.server.PHP_SELF}?language=portuguese"><img src="pt-flag.png"/></a>

It works. When I click the portuguese flag it changes the language to portuguese, but the URL becomes

"http:/mysite.com?language=portuguese"

I'm looking for a way to change the language without changing the URL... Can anybody tell me how?

Thanks!!

Kian · November 15, 2013

Keeping the same URL while showing the page into different languages is a very bad idea for SEO. There's a reason why Wikipedia uses it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ferrari, Amazon amazon.it, amazon.fr and Apple apple.com/it, apple.com/fr and so on.

Let's take as example the home page of your WHMCS system. The URL is example.com/index.php. It doesn't matter in what language your are browsing it. It could be in English or Italian. The URL will always be the same (with the exception of the ?language=italian part that you see only as soon as you switch language).

Now the problem is that when search engines like Google will try to index your page with their spiders (aka crawlers or bots), they will notice that there's one page (index.php) that displays content in different languages. How can they index this page? Should they index it in Italian? English? Spanish? The result of this is that your page will only be indexed with the default language (e.g. English) and then it's almost impossible for you to attract Italians and Spanish customers. So why should you spend so much time with translations if only the default language will be indexed? It's a no-sense.

In case you have implemented geolocalization on your website (e.g. visitors from Italy automatically see example.com/index.php in Italian, Spanish in Spanish etc.) then there will be a total mess for spiders. You could be penalized.

Said that, you should have an unique URL for each version of page. In this way example.com/it/index.php will be index properly by spiders on google.it for Italians, example.com/fr/index.php on google.fr for french and so on.

Edited November 15, 2013 by Kian

criat · November 15, 2013

Yeah I totally agree with you, but I use this:

<html lang="{$LANG.isocode}">

Output:

Brasil:

United States:

Simple yet very effective. It solves the problem, right?

Edited November 15, 2013 by criat

Kian · November 15, 2013

Not really because language system in WHMCS is still based on $_SESSION. It can be easily extended to $_COOKIE but it is still not good for SEO. Spiders in fact only index what they can crawl visiting your page without the support sessions and cookies. So if you have a part of a page or an entire one that is "visible" thanks to a session or a cookie, the spider simply won't be able to crawl it. Every language should have a canonical (unique) URL.

criat · November 16, 2013

damn... that's terrible news

This change my whole project, I'm almost finishing it....

How come I never heard of it?

There's no way to bypass this?

AffordableDomainsCanada · November 16, 2013

You can try something like such;

http://www.whmcs.com/members/communityaddons.php?action=viewmod&id=38

<a href="{$smarty.server.PHP_SELF}?language=English"><img  src="templates/{$template}/images/gb.jpg" title="English" alt="English"  width="31" height="21" border="0" /></a>
<a href="{$smarty.server.PHP_SELF}?language=English"><img  src="templates/{$template}/images/gb.jpg" title="English" alt="English"  width="31" height="21" border="0" /></a>
<a href="{$smarty.server.PHP_SELF}?language=Greek"><img  src="templates/{$template}/images/gr.jpg"  title="Ελληνικ?"   alt="Ελληνικ?"  width="31" height="21" border="0" /></a>
<a href="{$smarty.server.PHP_SELF}?language=Italian"><img  src="templates/{$template}/images/it.jpg" title="Italiano"  alt="Italiano" width="31" height="21" border="0" /></a>
<a href="{$smarty.server.PHP_SELF}?language=German"><img  src="templates/{$template}/images/de.jpg" title="Deutsch" alt="Deutsch"  width="31" height="21" border="0" /></a>
<a href="{$smarty.server.PHP_SELF}?language=French"><img  src="templates/{$template}/images/fr.jpg" title="Français"  alt="Français" width="31" height="21" border="0"  /></a>

criat · November 16, 2013

@MyEvolutionHost

Thanks, but that's exactly what I currently do.

criat · November 16, 2013

I've read about it on Google now.

Well, I think I'll have to make a HTML version of my site.

I would like to discuss it's structure here, before I do it.

First of all, I use HTTPS for everything in my site, it is good, right? My site strucutre would be like this then:

For HTML website, displaying products:

https://mysite.com -> English version

https://mysite.com/br -> Brazilian version

WHMCS would be on root as well, and would inherit the language specified by the HTML website:

https://mysite.com/clientarea.php

https://mysite.com/login.php

User would be automatically redirected to the right country based on their IP, and on the header there will be this, to allow changing countries if wrongly redirected:

If the country could not be specified, it would go to default (english)

Example:

I'm actually brazilian.

1 - I type mysite.com

2 - Get redirected to https://mysite.com/br

3 - Then I can browse products or login to WHMCS.

4 - If I login, I expect some interaction between the HTML and WHMCS, such as:

4.1 - If Logged in:

4.2 - If Logged out:

(Show login fields instead)

5 - I click on a link to buy a product

5.1 - I get redirected to WHMCS checkout, where I can complete the order.

5.2 - I add a product to cart but don't checkout yet. It should display 1 item in cart, like this script

Is it all possible? Is it the best way to do it?

Do you guys have any sugestions?

Thanks a lot for letting me know about this.

brian! · November 16, 2013

I don't know if this still works in the laterst version of whmcs, but take a look at http://blog.whmcs.com/guests.php?t=67990

ServWise.com · November 17, 2013

The best way to do this is to use URL_rewriting. See our site for a working example.

Add the following to your .htaccess for each language (the /whmcs folder is where whmcs is actually installed)


#force lang english
RewriteRule ^en/(.*).php?(.*)#(.*) /whmcs/$1.php?$2&language=english#$3 [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^en/(.*).php?(.*) /whmcs/$1.php?$2&language=english [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^en/(.*).php#(.*) /whmcs/$1.php?language=english#$2 [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^en/(.*).php$ /whmcs/$1.php?language=english [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^en/$ /whmcs/index.php?language=english  [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^en/(.*) /whmcs/$1 [NC,L,QSA] 

#force lang italian
RewriteRule ^it/(.*).php?(.*)#(.*) /whmcs/$1.php?$2&language=italian#$3 [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^it/(.*).php?(.*) /whmcs/$1.php?$2&language=italian [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^it/(.*).php#(.*) /whmcs/$1.php?language=italian#$2 [NC,L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^it/(.*).php$ /whmcs/$1.php?language=italian [NC,L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^it/$ /whmcs/index.php?language=italian  [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^it/(.*) /whmcs/$1 [NC,L,QSA]

ServWise.com · November 17, 2013

User would be automatically redirected to the right country based on their IP, and on the header there will be this, to allow changing countries if wrongly redirected:

Please please do not use IP as a way to detect language, 1. it is not very reliable and 2. is actually quite offencive for people who don't speak the native language of the place they live. (e.g. I am English but happen to live in Italy but don't speak good Italian and I hate it if I am redirected to the italian site even though my browser language setting is english.)

Much better and much simpler is to just use the browser language setting.

Here is the PHP script we use to redirect customers to our specific language pages.


<?php 
if(isset($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"])){
$langarray=explode(",", $_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"]);
$lang = strtolower($langarray[0]);
//echo $lang . " / " . $_COOKIE["Lang"] . " / ";
$stop=0; //change this to 1 to disable redirect
if ($_GET["stop"]!=1&&$stop!=1){
	if (isset($_COOKIE["Lang"])){
		if ($_COOKIE["Lang"]=="italian"){
			header("Location: " . $_SERVER["HOST"] . "it/"); 
		} else {
			header("Location: " . $_SERVER["HOST"] . "en/"); 	
		}
	} else {
		switch ($lang){
		case "en-au":
		case "en-bz":
		case "en-ca":
		case "en-029":
		case "en-gb":
		case "en-in":
		case "en-ie":
		case "en-jm":
		case "en-my":
		case "en-nz":
		case "en-ph":
		case "en-sg":
		case "en-za":
		case "en-tt":
		case "en-us":
		case "en-zw":
		case "en":
		case "gd":
		case "ga":
		case "ga-ie":
		case "cy-gb":
		case "cy":
			header("Location: " . $_SERVER["HOST"] . "en/"); 
			break;
		case "it":
		case "it-ch":
		case "it-it":
			header("Location: " . $_SERVER["HOST"] . "it/"); 
			break;
		case "es":
		case "es-es":
		case "es-ar":
		case "es-ve":
		case "es-bo":
		case "es-cl":
		case "es-co":
		case "es-cr":
		case "es-do":
		case "es-ec":
		case "es-sv":
		case "es-gt":
		case "es-hn":
		case "es-mx":
		case "es-ni":
		case "es-pa":
		case "es-py":
		case "es-pe":
		case "es-pr":
		case "es-us":
		case "es-uy":
			header("Location: " . $_SERVER["HOST"] . "es/"); 
			break;
		}
	}
}
}
?>

As you can see it checks to see if a "Lang" cookie is set and uses that as the clients language if it is, thus allowing the visitor to override the script on future visits if your site sets this cookie from a language choice in the site. Otherwise it looks at the browser language choice to picks the preferred language and defaults to english if it can't find a match.

criat · November 18, 2013

@ServWise

Thanks for the tips, I'll definitely use the browser lang redirect then

But, about the URL_Rewriting, I've just made my website in HTML from scratch, so now I'm thinking of sticking to it for displaying products and such.

The down points of using HTML in frontend is integrating codes like "Hello, client.name", because I have to see if client is online, grab his name and display there, and I still didn't find out how to do it.

- From the SEO point of view, from what I've read it seems to be fairly better

But one thing is annoying me: The affiliate system.

It won't work because of the redirects. Let's say my affiliate link is https://mysite.com?aff=004. When I access it, I go to https://mysite.com/br because of redirect, and the affiliate cookie simply won't grab. I'll make a topic of it

JCG · January 31

On 11/17/2013 at 12:58 PM, ServWise.com said:

#force lang english
RewriteRule ^en/(.*).php?(.*)#(.*) /whmcs/$1.php?$2&language=english#$3 [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^en/(.*).php?(.*) /whmcs/$1.php?$2&language=english [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^en/(.*).php#(.*) /whmcs/$1.php?language=english#$2 [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^en/(.*).php$ /whmcs/$1.php?language=english [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^en/$ /whmcs/index.php?language=english  [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^en/(.*) /whmcs/$1 [NC,L,QSA] 

#force lang italian
RewriteRule ^it/(.*).php?(.*)#(.*) /whmcs/$1.php?$2&language=italian#$3 [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^it/(.*).php?(.*) /whmcs/$1.php?$2&language=italian [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^it/(.*).php#(.*) /whmcs/$1.php?language=italian#$2 [NC,L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^it/(.*).php$ /whmcs/$1.php?language=italian [NC,L,QSA]
RewriteRule ^it/$ /whmcs/index.php?language=italian  [NC,L,QSA] 
RewriteRule ^it/(.*) /whmcs/$1 [NC,L,QSA]

Seems like this doesn't completely works on WHMCS v.8

All seems fine, except for the home page and any pages using index.php (announcements, password reset, etc).

Has anyone found a fix for this? Is it something with the new WHMCS rewriting these in the backend or a server config issue?

JCG · February 1

There is currently a request to make this work in v8 here:

https://requests.whmcs.com/idea/use-proper-canonical-names-for-languages

Add yourself on.

ServWise.com · February 2

Seriously I posted this 11 years ago and all WHMCS has done in that time is force customers into a per user monthly subscription (Even though this has no relation to their costs since it is a self-hosted system, same with cpanel) they are literally destroying the business sector they serve for their own profit, no win/win for these guys. AND still they don't have proper built-in multi-language capability, in fact they have made it even harder for people like me to bodge by moving a bunch of stuff to Laravel which won't support the same rewriting. Kinda sad when you think about it.

Change language without ?language=English in URL

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