Welcome to the fourth part of the Globalizing Mephisto article series which shows you how to enable the definition of the active locale via a path parameter rather than via subdomains.

• Part 1 – Installation and usage for single site mephisto
• Part 2 – Deployment and production issues
• Part 3 – Installation and usage for multi site mephisto
• Part 4 – Using a path parameter to define the locale

When I first posted about the mephisto_i18n plugin on the mephisto forum some people mentioned that they thought using subdomains to define the active locale wasn’t very handy, especially for mephisto instances on shared hosts.

In response to that feedback, I’ve now updated the plugin to allow locale definition either via:

• subdomains (default)
• path parameter

Using the ‘path parameter’ mode means you can have urls like this:

1
2
3
4
5

http://webtypes.com/
http://webtypes.com/es
http://webtypes.com/es/2007/5/15/globalizando-mephisto-3-parte
http://webtypes.com/es/sobre
http://webtypes.com/es/admin/articles/edit/2

Enabling path parameter mode in 3 easy steps

Update environment.rb

Mephisto::I18N.locale_definition = :path

Update routes.rb

Mephisto::Routing.connect_with map

Mephisto::I18N::Routing.connect_with map

Update your liquid templates (optional)

Optionally, modify any hard-coded links in your liquid templates like so:

<a href="/{{'blog' | t: 'urls'}}">{{'Weblog' | t}}</a>

<a href="{{i18n.l}}/{{'blog' | t: 'urls'}}">{{'Weblog' | t}}</a>

NOTE: This assumes you’ve already installed the plugin for a single site or multi site globalized mephisto.

What has been done for you automatically…

When in path parameter mode and the active locale is not the base locale then:

• The plugin automatically rewrites urls generated via the url_rewriter which means that all links using link_to and family are automatically correctly localized.
• The article/section & site urls (tag/search) are automatically prepended with the correct language code which means most of the links of your site will just work.

Please do try out this mode and, as usual, I appreciate your feedback.

Saimon Moore (also in Greek, Spanish & Catalan :)