International path alias not working

Question

I am trying to translate an existing site.

I've used i18n before successfully so I'm not totally new to it. Now to my problem…

I can create content fine in different languages the problem occurs when I try to access languages (other than the default, without path-prefix) with a path-prefix. I keep getting a 404.

Example:

• English
• Swedish

Their system-path counterparts:

• English
• Swedish

Any ideas about what might cause this?

Please note that this is a Drupal 6 install.

Answer 1

In reply to your fix you posted in language_initialize. It's very strange that the first arg would be empty.

So now that you've added in your changes, http://www.hillsongconference.co.uk/se/home works. However, this should be exactly the same as http://www.hillsongconference.co.uk/?q=se/home and you will see that this brings in the 404 error (whereas q=/se/home doesn't).

So I'm worndering if the htaccess file has been edited? As this is how Drupal converts the arguments in the url path to $_GET['q']. The Drupal .htaccess file also strips out leading slashes, to insure the first argument isn't empty.

You've hacked core now, which is a terrible no-no. Even if you are never going to update this site, it still needs to be fixed out of principle!

If you are running a nginx setup the correct rewrite (to not include the slash) is rewrite ^/(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last; not rewrite ^(.*)$ /index.php?q=$1 last;

Answer 2

As far as I know, in Drupal 6 it is not possible to assign the same alias to two different nodes. When requesting /home the system retrieves the first internal path it encounters (/node/1) in the url alias database table and shows it (works correct for English). However, when requesting /se/home it also retrieves that same internal path (/node/1) and checks if the node's language (en) matches the prefix (se). Because this ain't true, you'll encounter the 404.

I see two possibilities. 1) Change the url alias for swedish home to something else, i.e. "start".

2) Use a view to display the node. Views keep the same url for all languages while you can use a language filter to only show nodes of the current language, i.e. the view at /home shows English nodes while /se/home (as a view) only shows swedish nodes.

Answer 3

Ok everyone. I've had to go into core to figure this out. I'm back and I survived the trip.

I found out what is going wrong, no idea how any multi-lingual site works with this bug in it.

File: language.inc (function language_initialize)

The problem is this line and the loop beneath it.

$prefix = array_shift($args);

Because $args is an array of parts made after imploding $_GET['q'] the first string in that array is always going to be empty let me explain that with a picture:

That essentially means that the language will never be detected and the path will instead be treated like it's english "/se/home/". Fixed it by adding an extra $prefix = array_shift($args); just after it.