Best way to build a multilingual site with codeigniter?

Question

My current approach has been to use to _remap function provided by codeigniter to get the URI segment in order to check if the language is "en" or "np"

Here is a sample:

function _remap($url_title){

    $this->_identify_language($this->uri->segment(1));

    $data ['sub_categories'] = $this->category_model->get_category_list_by_url($url_title)->result_array();
    $data ['news'] = $this->news_model->get_news_list_by_url($url_title)->result_array();
    $data ['url_title'] = $url_title;

    $this->_render_front_view('main',$data);
}

I am using this technique on every controller. Which is well not very efficient.

I wanted to ask if using sessions to store language codes would be better or is my current technique good enough?

Are there any other ways i can do this multi-lingual thing?

Of course my database is currently shaped for 2 lanaguages and i have seperated the fields. e.g:- title_en, title_np. these are echoed according to the language field used.

Answer 1

Lots of parts to this.

1. Your URL's do not really need to be /en/ and /fr/ unless you want it to be used for Google Analytics. Spidering doesn't make a lot of difference. Accept-Language headers can be just as reliable.

2. Globally parse this URL segment. You can use this method or the Accept-Language, but either way you need a hook, a MY_Controller or extend the Lang class.

3. Think about if you want the different languages to be totally seperate. For example, if I have an English page not translated to French, and the French page does not exist, should it show the English page or 404? You can either store the lang = fr in the database and take the value from a constant set in the hook/MY_Controller/etc.

   WHERE lang = CURRENT_LANGUAGE

4. Structure your DB. title_en title_fr is one method, but it soon because unmanagable with lots of languages. Have a "pages" and "page_content" table, so that all generic information is in one table then all language specific (title, content, meta, etc) is in the page_conten table, which has a lang field.

There are a million ways to do all of this, but there is lots more to think about than just the URL. My favourite