Internationalized Websites

The locale model which is part of nereid allows you to build web applications capable of being used across users of different languages and currencies. This guide explains the design behind locales.

Single Locale

If your application caters to users of a signle region you may not want your application to be available in multiple locales. In this case you can leave the Available Locales field in the website settings empty.

Multiple Locales

If your application caters to multiple locales, the first step would be creating the required locales. Locales once created can be reused across multiple websites.

Creating a locale

Every locale consists of a code which is also used as a prefix in the URL path.

  • code: The code is used as a prefix in the URL when the application has multiple locales. An example of such a code could be en-us.
  • language: The tryton language that should be used when the locale is chosen. Considering the above example of code (en-us), the language could be en_US (available at installation with Tryton).
  • currency: The tryton currency that should be used when the locale is chosen. Considering the above example the currency could be USD.

This design allows your application to adapt to most requirements of localisation. For example if your web application has to be available to users in Spain, France and Belgium and has content in English, French and Spanish, a good way to use locales would be:

Code Langauge Currency
en en_GB EUR
fr fr_FR EUR
es es_ES EUR

URLs

Once the locales are added to available locales of a website, the application begins to prefix the code to the URLs. For example, the home page which was previously available on http://example.com/ would now be available on http://example.com/en-us assuming en-us is the code of a locale in your setup.

Tip

The application needs to be restarted if it is already running for the URL changes to take effect.

Pro-Tip: Migrating from Single Locale to Multiple Locales

You may have started off with a single locale website and you now want to start using multiple locales. Search engines may have already indexed your site and users may already have bookmarks and you do not want to break your website. The best way to handle such a situation would be to create redirects in your web server configuration.

Similarly if you want to fallback to single locale from multiple locales, web server redirects are your best tools for the job.