HI there all - I’m looking for some advice on how to best go about using a segment to achieve multi-langual in an existing site. In my mind, it would make most sense to have the language designator be the first segment of the site. So domainname.com/en/ for english or domainname.com/fr/ for french. I’m only dealing with those two languages - and since that’s expected to be the case permanently, I could simply make it that the language segment is only needed for the french content. But i would like to accomplish it with the following set of circumstances:
1) since the site was already set up, the way i devised for the multilingual entries to be handled is that I added a language selector (a radio button) to every entry screen in the existing channels. This way, french and english content doesn’t have to be entered at the same time and I can leave the set of required custom fields as they were already. So to display french or english content, I would simply add the search parameter to my entries tags to filter english versus french. I also have the english version of a given entry linked to its french equivalent entry with a relationship field so that i can link directly back and forth between them.
2) It’s my intention to use the same templates for english and french content - the client does not see any need for the URL structure to be bilingual and I don’t really want to duplicate the templates unless I have to.
3) I have not removed index.php from the URLs (yet)
So my main question is how do I use the first segment of the site as a language selector and not have it interacting with EE’s usual structure of segment one being a template group and segment 2 being a template name? I already have a series of template groups and templates set up that I would like to maintain? Is it an htaccess exercise? Or is there an add-on that I should be using to permit this template group / template behaviour?