what is the best way to have langage specific start pages dependent on the browser settings of the user?
The way I found out was to specify a "DefaultPage" as my start page that only contains a "Redirector" Module. This module checks the browser's language settings and redirects to "Startseite" if the browser language is "de-DE", else to "Home".
Because in the mean time I get problems on this way I am looking for a better solution:
1.) How can I obtain the real URL the user enters before DNN maps it to the start page?
2.) or is there a DNN-specific way that does what I want?
I have DNN Version 7.3.3.118.
I hope this will help you, what I understand is that you want site to display the page in language what browser is having.
There are language packages in DNN,install them these can help you.
the system checks preferred bowser language(s) of the user and tries to match with installed languages in your website. If there is a match, best match is used, otherwise site default language is presented.
https://www.dnnsoftware.com/answers/set-default-language-based-on-user-login-country-in-dnn
Surely language is an individual thing, and better set based on the user's browser settings or an explicit setting that they've selected and saved (via session/cookie).
If I'm sending a page I've just read to my french-speaking friend it would be better without any language code in the URL, so it opens in French for him based on his browser setting or on an earlier visit to the site.
This seems very obvious to me... but a LOT of major sites put the language in the URL. So I feel I must be missing something... What?
The only advantage I can see if for indexation purpose. If your web site needs to be indexed (e-commerce products for instance) then the language become very important for regional search engines.
For instance here is an extract from Google doc :
Google uses the content of the page to determine its language, but the
URL itself provides human users with useful clues about the page’s
content. For example, the following .ca URLs use fr as a subdomain or
subdirectory to clearly indicate French content:
http://example.ca/fr/vélo-de-montagne.html and
http://fr.example.ca/vélo-de-montagne.html.
How can I change the browser language preference setting programmatically?
In the scenario at hand, I want to start the webapp in different languages. The app delivers the language as requested in the browser's language preferences, so I want to reconfigure the browser to English, perform some steps, then reconfigure the browser to a different language, and repeat those steps.
For automation, I'd use VBScript (using some COM server?) or QTP (which basically is just a VBScript client in this context), but I don't think this should matter.
If Ansgar does not disagree, I post the final result of researching this topic:
It seems there is no better way than updating HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Internet Explorer\International\AcceptLanguage, and (at least) broadcasting a WM_SETTINGCHANGE message via SendMessage so every process in the current session sees this change immediately.
See http://www.codeproject.com/Articles/20756/Change-Internet-Explorer-Proxy-Setting-without-R for good examples how to do that.
do what google does (rather used to do)....
add a language parameter to your query string from your app...
eg. google.com/?ln=id&from=myApp
on the sessionstart event handler.... determine the ln parameter of the request and redirect the request to the appropriate web page versions, provide an English fallback if their system language is not supported by your site.
or
Add a translation widget to your website (bing.com/translate)... to allow visitors to use machine/human generated translations.
i'm in the process of adding a US site to my current UK site. I'd like to do this as transaprently as possible so that we don't lose any traffic to existing links. We're currently running this under version 1.4.1.1 of Magento on a shared hosting setup.
The new website (US) will be essentially the same as the current (UK) site, but with US Dollar pricing instead of Pound Sterling.
We currently have a GeoIP setup whereby visitors are redirected to either UK or US site whilst utulising the same URL. This essentially means that we have switch statements in our index.php to indicate what run code to use.
Here's my question:
what's the best way of selecting/overriding the GeoIP selection via the standard store switcher selector dropbox? Both websites are being populated in the dropbox, however, since both are utilising the same URL (www.example.com/boutique) the default one is the only one that's being selected.
I've also tried the &_store= as well as the &_website= arguments with no success.
Any ideas? are URL rewrites in .htaccess the answer? if so, any ideas as what to use?
P.S. this is the method that's pretty much being followed however my aim is to let users override their location-specific website (e.g. US) if necessary:http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/4_-_themes_and_template_customization/navigation/multiple-website-setup#multiple_website_setup_for_useuuk_storespricing
Have you tried using a getUrl() method to build the store arguments for you? It can help clear up those little misunderstandings, for example I'm pretty sure the store parameter is supposed to have three underscores but cannot really remember so I use the function instead.
The best way to over-ride is to have a little php program, e.g. 'countries.php' that sets a cookie depending on the country code that you choose or 'auto' to test regular geoip. Then in your index.php have an 'if cookie then use cookie code else use geoip code'. Naturally the cookie can only be set by your test program.
And yes, you only need set 'website' not 'store'. There is no benefit in your US customers being able to see your UK prices (and vice-versa) so don't even bother with setting up a frontend drop-down. Or, if you really want, you can have rest-of-the-world customers choose their currency/website and put your own cookie-setting code in the header for them, with a couple of nice flag icons.
When I look at Amazon.com and I see their URL for pages, it does not have .htm, .html or .php at the end of the URL.
It is like:
http://www.amazon.com/books-used-books-textbooks/b/ref=topnav_storetab_b?ie=UTF8&node=283155
Why and how? What kind of extension is that?
Your browser doesn't care about the extension of the file, only the content type that the server reports. (Well, unless you use IE because at Microsoft they think they know more about what you're serving up than you do). If your server reports that the content being served up is Content-Type: text/html, then your browser is supposed to treat it like it's HTML no matter what the file name is.
Typically, it's implemented using a URL rewriting scheme of some description. The basic notion is that the web should be moving to addressing resources with proper URIs, not classic old URLs which leak implementation detail, and which are vulnerable to future changes as a result.
A thorough discussion of the topic can be found in Tim Berners-Lee's article Cool URIs Don't Change, which argues in favour of reducing the irrelevant cruft in URIs as a means of helping to avoid the problems that occur when implementations do change, and when resources do move to a different URL. The article itself contains good general advice on planning out a URI scheme, and is well worth a read.
More specifically than most of these answers:
Web content doesn't use the file extension to determine what kind of file is being served (unless you're Internet Explorer). Instead, they use the Content-type HTTP header, which is sent down the wire before the content of the image, HTML page, download, or whatever. For example:
Content-type: text/html
denotes that the page you are viewing should be interpreted as HTML, and
Content-type: image/png
denotes that the page is a PNG image.
Web servers often use the file extension if the file is served directly from disk to determine what Content-type to assign, but web applications can also generate pages with any Content-type they like in response to a request. No matter the filename's structure or extension, so long as the actual content of the page matches with the declared Content-type, the data renders as intended.
For websites that use Apache, they are probably using mod_rewrite that enables them to rewrite URLS (and make them more user and SEO friendly)
You can read more here http://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.0/mod/mod_rewrite.html
and here http://www.sitepoint.com/article/apache-mod_rewrite-examples/
EDIT: There are rewriting modules for IIS as well.
Traditionally the file extension represents the file that is being served.
For example
http://someserver/somepath/image.jpg
Later that same approach was used to allow a script process the parameter
http://somerverser/somepath/script.php?param=1234&other=7890
In this case the file was a php script that process the "request" and presented a dinamically created file.
Nowadays, the applications are much more complex than that ( namely amazon that you metioned )
Then there is no a single script that handles the request ( but a much more complex app wit several files/methods/functions/object etc ) , and the url is more like the entry point for a web application ( it may have an script behind but that another thing ) so now web apps like amazon, and yes stackoverflow don't show an file in the URL but anything comming is processed by the app in the server side.
websites urls without file extension?
Here I questions represents the webapp and 322747 the parameter
I hope this little explanation helps you to understand better all the other answers.
Well how about a having an index.html file in the directory and then you type the path into the browser? I see that my Firefox and IE7 both put the trailing slash in automatically, I don't have to type it. This is more suited to people like me that do not think every single url on earth should invoke php, perl, cgi and 10,000 other applications just in order to sent a few kilobytes of data.
A lot of people are using an more "RESTful" type architecture... or at least, REST-looking URLs.
This site (StackOverflow) dosn't show a file extension... it's using ASP.NET MVC.
Depending on the settings of your server you can use (or not) any extension you want. You could even set extensions to be ".JamesRocks" but it won't be very helpful :)
Anyways just in case you're new to web programming all that gibberish on the end there are arguments to a GET operation, and not the page's extension.
A number of posts have mentioned this, and I'll weigh in. It absolutely is a URL rewriting system, and a number of platforms have ways to implement this.
I've worked for a few larger ecommerce sites, and it is now a very important part of the web presence, and offers a number of advantages.
I would recommend taking the technology you want to work with, and researching samples of the URL rewriting mechanism for that platform. For .NET, for example, there google 'asp.net url rewriting' or use an add-on framework like MVC, which does this functionality out of the box.
In Django (a web application framework for python), you design the URLs yourself, independent of any file name, or even any path on the server for that matter.
You just say something like "I want /news/<number>/ urls to be handled by this function"