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Frontend Redirection

Multilingual offers the possibility to redirect a page request that does not contain frontend language information to another URL that does contain this information.

If, when and how a redirect is performed can be defined in the "Multilingual Redirect" configuration.

![IMAGE "Frontend Redirection Configuration"]

Redirect

The first setting will allow you to define if and when a redirect will be performed:

  1. Always redirect
  2. Only redirect if a matching language is found
  3. Never redirect

While option 1 and 3 seem pretty self-explanatory option 2 requires an understanding of how the Frontend Language Detection mechanism of Multilingual works:

If Multilingual can't detect a valid language-code in the URL (either by query string, path or domain-configuration) it will have no distinct information about which language it should set as frontend-language. To make the best out of this situation and not immediately fall back to the configured default language Multilingual comes with two more language detection methods that try to "guess" which language could be the best possible match. The first of these "guessing" methods will check for a cookie that might contain language information from a previous visit, the second one will have a look at the browser settings and check if one of the accepted languages matches one of the offered languages.

So what does this mean for our configuration settings?

  1. Choosing "Always redirect" means Multilingual will trigger a redirect, even if neither cookie nor browser settings deliver a matching language. The redirect will use Multilingual's default language as frontend-language.
  2. Choosing "Only redirect if a matching language is found" means Multilingual will only trigger a redirect if a matching language could be detected by either cookie or browser settings.
  3. Choosing "Never redirect" means Multilingual will never trigger a redirect.

Note: The idea behind option 2 is to avoid "forcing" visitors into the default language in scenarios where it's unlikely that they're comfortable with that language. Instead they could be offered a list of all available languages to manually choose from.

Redirect Method

Besides when a redirect will happen you can also define where a redirect should point to:

  1. domain.tld → domain.tld/xy/ (Redirect to URL path)
  2. domain.tld → domain.tld?language=xy (Redirect to URL query string)
  3. domain.tld → domain.xy (Redirect to (sub)domain)

Redirects will only work as expected if this setting matches the URL structure you're using for your multilingual website.