Multilingual sites

Kiln supports sites in which some or all of the content is available in more than one language. It does this by having a language code as the first element in all public URLs (not internal, not admin).

For example, if the site consisted of resources at index.html, about/index.html, and about/process.html, and these resources were available in both English and Telugu, the URLs for these resources would be:

  • /en/index.html
  • /en/about/index.html
  • /en/about/process.html
  • /te/index.html
  • /te/about/index.html
  • /te/about/process.html

Implementation

All of the matches in sitemaps/main.xmap incorporate a language code prefix that is used in the various transformations. The language code is passed as a parameter to XSLT that include stylesheets/defaults.xsl. This value is used in XSLT when creating links to textual content within Kiln.

A default language code must be set in sitemaps/config.xmap in the global variable default-display-language.

Kiln also follows the approach for internationalisation (i18n) as documented in the Cocoon documentation. A sample catalogue of translations is available in assets/translations/messages_en.xml; translations into other languages should use the same filename convention and content format. Note that of the provided templates and menus, only assets/templates/home.xml and assets/menu/main.xml have even partial i18n markup; this must be added where appropriate to templates and XSLT.

HTTP content negotiation

Kiln does not include any code for handling automatic content negotiation based on the HTTP Accept-Language header.

Nice URLs for monolingual sites

Monolingual sites also use the same URL scheme with a language code prefix, which may not be desired in production. This problem can be solved by using, for example, mod_proxy and mod_proxy_html with Apache HTTPD to rewrite headers and links so that users see the URLs without the language code prefix.