Serendipity Forums

Hello

is it possible to make multilinguage plugin more SE friendly?

1) As far as I understand, at the moment s9y has some inner (session) variable which tells it which language to show.
this is no good
I suggest:
url.com/en
url.com/de
and the default language can be at url.com

2) when viewing single entry the link to some other language is not mod_rewritten. This should also be changed

any other ideas from fellow multilang-bloggers?

Hi!

It would be possible, but it's a lot of work. Both solutions would be REALLY a lot of work since ALL mod_Rewrite rules need to be changed.

Actually, this would result in a nearly complete rewrite of the plugin to support what you want.

How about using Categories for different languages instead? Then you can use permalinks for those, and have translated entries simply in another category. Then you cannot switch per-entry, but at least you have SEO friendly URLs and no variables.

Best regards,
Garvin

garvinhicking wrote: How about using Categories for different languages instead?

hm, sounds like a good workarround. Not exactly what I want, but might do the job

thanks for answering

As far as I can see in my local test environment, it is still a normal behavior, that a saved link form a article in the second language view (and with the second language url) will open the article in default language.

I think this is not an optimal user experience.
Does somebody has experiences how well (or bad) google works with multi-language entries?

I understand, that open up a article link only with the article number and without checking the following text is common seo-practice and helps preventing dead links after renaming the article.

Could this behavior be changed in a way, that if the correct title is found in a link to a multi-language article, the article would open the directly the correspondending lang-version?
I imagine, there would have to be a second check between link parsing and article opening to set the correct lang-variable?

Hi!

But if you use the multilingual plugin and change the language to another language, it should actually append ?serendipity[lang_selected]=XX (or sth like that) to the URL; thus making the URL to be copy&pastable to any place, while keeping the current translation of it?

Regards,
Garvin

I have a local test installation without rewriting. German is my default language, english should be the second option for readers. Normally my link to an article looks like this:
localhost/index.php?/archives/88-netter-artikel-in-deutsch.html

If my blog is in default language (german) and I open the detail view of an article with the link in the footer provided by the event plugin serendipity_event_multilingual, I get a unique url for the language version of that article.
localhost/index.php?archives/88-English.html&serendipity[lang_selected]=en&serendipity[user_language]=en or
localhost/index.php?archives/88-Default.html&serendipity[lang_selected]=default&serendipity[user_language]=default
OK.

Now, if I change the language from the whole blog with the sidebar plugin selector serendipity_plugin_multilingual, I get an overview page, with all articles in the selected language (if available). This overview page has the same url like the default version, but a different content.

All links lead to extended views with the translated title, like
localhost/index.php?/archives/88-nice-article-in-english-language.html

If I open the url with the English title in a different browser, I get always the default language version of that article.

Yeah...that'll most likely not change... I also quite like that feature, that the content of the page adheres to my language settings, and that URLs are not swamped with language keys everywhere.

Regards,
Garvin

The reason I am asking is the question: "What does Google think, if two different contents are available under the same url and what if two different urls show the same content?"

I guess the second case is not that bad, it happens all the time. But what is with the first case?

But maybe my test-installation is not correct working or I am missing something else. At the moment, opening the extended view with the link "Continue reading..." leads always to the default language article, despite of the lang-setting in the sidebar.

I think Google is shrewd enough to understand that even it was two different url with same content.
The first url is written in German and the second is written in English.
Likewise, it belong to the same owner.