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This Kohana module helps you to setup a multilingual site with URLs that contain a language at the beginning, e.g.:

  • http://example.com/en
  • http://example.com/fr/page
  • http://example.com/nl/other/page

Note: this module will force all URLs that point to your Kohana app to contain a language.

How it works

You can think of this module as a lightweight outer layer around your Kohana app. Any incoming URL is immediately inspected for a language part. This check happens during Request::instance. Two things can happen.

A. The URI does not contain a language

If somebody visits http://example.com/page, without a language, the best default language will be found and the user will be redirected to the same URL with that language prepended. To find the best language, the following elements are taken into account (in this order):

  1. a language cookie (set during a previous visit);
  2. the HTTP Accept-Language header;
  3. a hard-coded default language.

B. The URI does contain a language

  1. The language key is chopped off and stored in Request::$lang.
  2. I18n::$lang is set to the correct target language (from config).
  3. The correct locale is set (from config).
  4. A cookie with the language key is set.
  5. Normal request processing continues.

It is important to be aware that the language part is completely chopped off of the URI. When normal request processing continues it, it does so with a URI without language. This means that your routes must not contain a <lang> key. Also, you can create HMVC subrequests without having to worry about adding the current language to the URI.

The one thing we still need to take care of then, is that any generated URLs should contain the language. An extension of URL::site is created for this. A third argument, $lang, is added to URL::site. By default, the current language is used (Request::$lang). You can also provide another language key as a string, or set the argument to FALSE to generate a URL without language.

Configuration

In the config/lang.php file you can set all available languages for your site. The keys of the array are the language strings used in the URL, e.g. en, fr, nl, etc. For each language you can set the target language for the I18n class, as well as the locale to use for that language.

To change the hard-coded default language ('en'), set Lang::$default in your bootstrap.php file. You can also change the name of the language cookie ('lang') by setting Lang::$cookie.