Question

I’m developing a niche social networking site that is going multilingual. That means our current URL structure will soon need to start using translated words for slugs like the following:

www.example.com/home becomes www.example.com/inicio

www.example.com/profile becomes www.example.com/perfil

www.example.com/help becomes www.example.com/ayuda

And so on. My question is: what’s the best way to support this in a PHP application? For incoming requests, I thought a dictionary like the following in my router.php file would suffice:

<?php
$request = explode("/", trim($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], "/"));

// Dictionaries of page slugs.
$slugs = array(
    'es' => array(
        'inicio' => 'home',
        'perfil' => 'profile',
        'ayuda' => 'help',
    )
    // additional languages can be added here
);

// Rewrite any incoming (foreign) requests
if ($host=="www.example.es") { // to be made programmatic
    $lang = "es"; // pick up from locale constant rather being hard-coded
    if (array_key_exists($request[0], $slugs[$lang])) {
        $request[0] = $slugs[$lang][$request[0]];
    }
}

...

Which basically takes URL segments and matches them against an English counter-part if it exists. If not, then it will proceed as normal and most likely cause a 404 as a controller doesn’t exist for URL segment.

Although this words, I need it to be backwards-compatible too. For example, when building URLs in my application.

Naturally, as the application is only English at the moment these are just hard-coded. So say, when fetching a User object I do the following:

<?php
class User {

    function __construct($id) {
        // fetch user details
        $this->profile_url = ROOT . "/profile/" . $this->username;
    }
}

What is the best method to then replace instances of "/profile/" being hard-coded to getting the translated version, i.e. "/perfil/" in the Spanish site?

Answer 1

I have something similar in an application I’m developing.

Each page has a unique ID which is matched to a slug, page title, meta description and such for each language in a table.

As for the people saying it’s not standard practice and not to bother with it I disagree as having nicely translated URLs can help your SEO in different languages.