How to set multiple domains for one language

Question

I have a multilingual site with Drupal 7 using subdomains like en.example.com to detect the language. Everything works like expected, but I have a mobile version of the website witch I want to be accessible by domains like en.m.example.com etc. How do I do this? I can set in admin/config/regional/language only one domain per language, but would have to set two in order to get that working, like:

for English:
en.example.com & en.m.example.com

for German:
de.example.com & de.m.example.com
etc.

(I would like to have the same structure as Wikipedia has.) The problem is, that using subdomains for language selection, Drupal creates all internal links as absolute pathes. For example, a menu link will be created as:

<li class="menu-773"><a href="http://en.example.com/test" >test</a></li>
and not as
<li class="menu-773"><a href="/test" >test</a></li>

So, I could create a domain alias with Apache, to send requests from en.m.example.com to en.example.com, but all internal links would bring the user back from the mobile version to the normal. How can I solve this problem?

Answer 1

Once you've set up Drupal to serve different languages in different domains, you need to instruct your web server to send requests from multiple domains to the same Drupal site.

In Apache, you'll need to edit the .conf (httpd.conf) file and add aliases to all the different domains. For example:

ServerName en.example.com
ServerAlias en.m.example.com

In addition to this, you'll also need to point the domain name server (DNS) to your server for all the domain names in different languages.

Answer 2

The answer is: using multiple domains for one language is not possible with Drupal 7 and there is – as far as I know – no module that adds that functionality.

But to achieve this aim anyway, there is workaround: As mentioned above, the problem with language domains is, that all internal pathes that have an language specific path alias and are created with the Drupal core function url() are created as absolute pathes. Responsible for that behaviour is the function:

locale_language_url_rewrite_url(&$path, &$options)

1. Don't set a language domain for that default language. If you don't do that, Drupal will not create absolute pathes for the default language if – for example – use the domain xyz.example.com, where xyz.example.com is not set as domain for any language, Drupal will create al urls relative and so clicking of any internal link will keep the subdomain. But you can't use that method, if you want to have language sensitive subdomains as described above:

   for English: en.example.com & en.m.example.com

   for German: de.example.com & de.m.example.com etc.

2. So the second method would be, to alter the current language of all types with the function: hook_language_init. I use the following code, to get the above example working:

:

# hook_language_init()
function my_module_language_init() {
  // Current path
  $url = $_SERVER['SERVER_NAME'];

  // Global language object and get languages
  global $language;
  $languages = language_list();

  // Get all subdomains
  $reg = '/^((?:([^\.]+)\.)?(?:([^\.]+)\.))?([^\.]+\.[^\.]+)$/i';
  preg_match($reg, $url, $up);

  # We won't allow all subdomains, only 'm.' and 'm2.'
  # Change this for an other use case.
  if ($up[3] == "m2" || $up[3] == "m") {

    if (!isset($languages[$up[2]])) {
      $langcode = $language->language;
    } else { 
      $langcode = $up[2];
    }
    $new_language         = $languages[$langcode];
    $new_language->domain = $new_language->language . "." . $up[3] .".". $up[4];

    // Set url options
    $options['language'] = $new_language;
    $types = language_types();

    // Set all language types and language domains
    foreach ($types as $type) {
      $GLOBALS[$type] = $new_language;
      $GLOBALS[$type]->domain = $new_language->domain;
    }
  }
}