Language switch?

[winkelement]

Is there any existing theme implementing a language switch? Is multilanguage routing only determined by the browser language without any possibilty (as a user) to switch languages? How would i go about implementing a language switch myself into a template?

[marcantondahmen]

Hi, language routing is theme agnostic. Whenever you enable the language router, the top-level routes replace the actual / home route. The language, or better "language route" is chosen by a couple of factors whenever a visitor hits the / homepage:

1. Did the visitor has been visiting the site within the current session and a language can be found in the session -> use that route
2. The user visits the site the first time on /, check HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE and that language exists on the site -> use that route
3. If both fails -> use the language route that comes first in the order in the sidebar

If a user hits any other route like /en/about, that page will be displayed and en will be saved as selected language in the session.

Note that all pages outside of the selected language are "invisible" in terms of navigation. So you can put both, /en/projects and /de/projekte in the navbar or footer at the same time. When a user hits the /de/... route, he will only see the /de/projekte link and not the /en/projects.

Why is this important? This behavior allows for showing a "Switch to English" link on a german page by following these steps:

1. Create a page in the german namespace like /de/switch-to-english
2. Redirect it to /en in the page seittings
3. Depending on the theme, add it to the footer or navbar links

It is important that the switcher link (to en) is under the "other" language (de). Since the linking page lives under /de, it will be displayed when browsing the site in German, but it will be hidden otherwise,

You can repeat the same logic with English or other languages.

You can find a litte introduction in this blog post