Forum Archive - Language home pages

How would I build a home page for different languages in Joomla? mysite.com/de mysite.com/fr Etc.

Not sure I understand what exactly do you need. Your home page will be automatically translated to German and the URL will be http://yoursite.com/de/

I don't want to miss out on hits and the /de etc. bypasses the home page. Also the translation breaks my homepage template. It would be better if I could assign a home page for each language.

If you want to assign a custom page instead of your automatically translated page then you need to edit your .htaccess file to rewrite yoursite.com/de/ to your custom page.

Is it really that simple? So if I change the htaccess file to point to say... mysite.com/de/home.html then the Google pages will go there instead of the default home page? That would be very cool. What about the sitemap?

Not sure if you understood me correctly. I'll try to be as simple as possible this time. As I understand you want to change/customize yoursite.com/de/ page which is automatically generated by GTranslate. For that you create a file somewhere in your server and make the modifications or whatever you write in it and call it let's say index_de.html So you want the visitor/crawler to see index_de.html file when they access yoursite.com/de/ instead of automatically generated one. For that you modify your .htaccess file to point yoursite.com/de/ to index_de.html. The sitemap don't need to be changed in that case.

Thank you very much for helping me. I will try the above and let you know how it goes.

Does the index_de.html have to be in the yoursite.com/de/ directory or can it be located anywhere as long as the htaccess points to it?

You don't need to create de folder and you shouldn't do that. It can be placed anywhere on your site.

This is harder than I expected. What do I put in the htaccess to point to a specific file? Example How to get mysite.com/de to point to mysite.com/index_de.html I do not understand the gtranslate htaccess code and do not want to screw anything up. How to add to this RewriteRule ^([a-z]{2})/(.*)$ /gtranslate/translate.php?lang=$1&url=$2 [L,QSA] RewriteRule ^([a-z]{2})$ /gtranslate/translate.php?lang=$1 [L,QSA] RewriteRule ^(zh-CN)/(.*)$ /gtranslate/translate.php?lang=$1&url=$2 [L,QSA] RewriteRule ^(zh-CN)$ /gtranslate/translate.php?lang=$1 [L,QSA] RewriteRule ^(zh-TW)/(.*)$ /gtranslate/translate.php?lang=$1&url=$2 [L,QSA] RewriteRule ^(zh-TW)$ /gtranslate/translate.php?lang=$1 [L,QSA] I really appreciate your help with this. The more I learn the more I appreciate all your hard work on gtranslate - it is a work of art.

To rewrite de to index_de.html you need to write this before # gtranslate config RewriteRule ^de/$ /index_de.html [L] RewriteRule ^de$ /index_de.html [L] # gtranslate config ... So when you access yoursite.com/de or yoursite.com/de/ you will see the contents index_de.html

Thank you!