multilingual website php

Question

For the past few days I've been stuck with creating a PHP-based multilingual website. I've tried a great deal of solutions but had no luck so far.

This is how I would like my URL's to look:
http://www.example.com/en/about
http://www.example.com/cs/o-nas
etc.

I've been using this rewrite rule BEFORE I decided to implement multilingual support and it worked just fine:

RewriteBase /kittytea/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ ?page=$1 [L]

My links look like this:

<a href="about">

Has anyone got an idea how to add the multilingual support? I'm familiar with passing URL parameters using the GET method.

I might add that I'm using a simple PHP SWITCH statement for loading individual website sections.

PS - It's a very small website and I don't need a top notch solution. I just want to make it work :)

Thanks!

Answer 1

You can try including the 2 letter language code as part of the rewrite:

RewriteBase /kittytea/

# with language
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([a-z]{2})/([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ ?lang=$1&page=$2 [L]

# original, without language
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9_-]+)$ ?page=$1 [L]

Your php script would then need to check for the 2 letter language code in the lang parameter and return the appropriate content.

Then you'd need to change your links to:

<a href="en/about">