Are your pages mostly static HTML files, or stored in a database and served by a CGI/PHP script or equivalent? If the latter, then it should be pretty easy to add a language column in the table for each page/text and store that in a cookie or session variable.
If your pages are mostly static, and you have a naming scheme like page.en.html for english and page.ie.html for irish, you could use a PHP script to view the pages, link instead of linking to page.<language>.html from a page, you could link to view.php?page=<page> and that PHP script could read a cookie to determine which language to display in. Switching between languages would then be a simple case of setting a cookie.
You can also do this 'automatically' via mod_rewrite in apache, turning static page references into PHP requests :
Consider a .htaccess file with mod_rewrite rules such as :
Code:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteRule (.*)\.en\.html$ view.php?page=$1&l=en [L]
RewriteRule (.*)\.ie\.html$ view.php?page=$1&l=ie [L]
RewriteRule (.*)\.html$ view.php?page=$1 [L]
This would convert a request for 'page1.en.html' into 'view.php?page=page1&l=en' and also 'page1.html' into 'view.php?page=page1', so every request for a HTML page gets redirected transparently (to the browser) through a PHP script where you can do your magic :
Code:
<?php
// if a language is explicitally set, via access to :
// <page>.<language>.html -or-
// view.php?page=<page>&l=<language>
if (isset($_REQUEST['l']) && $_REQUEST['l'] != '') {
// then use the language from the request, and set a cookie.
$lang = $_REQUEST['l'];
setcookie("lang", $lang);
echo "switching language : $lang<br>";
} else {
// otherwise,
// is a cookie set with a language?
if (isset($_COOKIE['lang']) && $_COOKIE['lang'] != '') {
// yes, use that language
$lang = $_COOKIE['lang'];
} else {
// no, use a default language for now.
// (could use the 'Accept-Language' HTTP header to get this)
$lang = 'en';
}
}
// write the switch-language links which we want on every page
echo '<a href="' . $_REQUEST['page'] . '.en.html">english</a> ';
echo '<a href="' . $_REQUEST['page'] . '.ie.html">irish</a> ';
echo "<hr>\n";
// read the actual page
readfile($_REQUEST["page"].".".$lang.".html");
?>
... with this, you'd store your pages like (notice the same link) :
page1.en.html :
Page in english, another page <a href="another-page.html">here</a>
page1.ie.html :
Page in irish, another page <a href="another-page.html">here</a>
... and the PHP script would be invoked on every request which would make display the page according to the language cookie set.
edit : Maybe an example would explain it better
heres a link to a working demo on my website
http://haxor.me.uk/languagetest/test.html
). Keep his cookie code and the .htaccess idea (if poss) but do the rest my vay! (So long as you're using PHP on your site, or have it available on your hosting.)
... unless anyone has a suggestion.
