[Catalyst] Multilanguage application

[Brian Cassidy]

Hi Renaud,

Renaud Drousies wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I am trying to figure out what would be the best way to have a
> multilanguage support in a catalyst application.
>
> I thought using a url-based method might be better since this site could
> be visited by people that do not accept cookies, or do not visit it from
> their home computer (and then could not have the Accept-Language header
> set correctly).
>   
[* SNIP *]
> I was then wondering if that was the good way (and the one with less
> effort) to handle multilanguage sites with catalyst, without relying on
> cookies and accept-language headers. Any thoughts? :)
>   

As you've noted, the Accept-Language header for a particular user agent 
may not be set properly, however, there is a decent workaround that we 
use for our apps:

NB: We're using apache 2 for this trick

1) Use the I18N plugin. This will give you the framework for a 
multi-lingual app. It relies on the Accept-Language header, so, via the 
test server you'll have to change your browser settings to test each 
language.

2) Enable mod_headers

LoadModule headers_module modules/mod_headers.so

3) For a particular site, bind a url to a language by setting the 
Accept-Language header explicitly.

Example, we have a news aggregator we call the "newswire". the urls are 
set up as follows:

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName    newswire.nald.ca
    RequestHeader set Accept-Language en

# etc
</VirtualHost>

<VirtualHost *>
    ServerName    filsdepresse.bdaa.ca
    RequestHeader set Accept-Language fr

# etc
</VirtualHost>

You could, if you wanted, bind the languages to /en/ and /fr/ off of one 
particular url just as easily.

HTH,

-Brian