Hello everyone!
I've got a situation where I have to build a landing page for language selection - it consists of some images + select box for language and submit button or just links with flags. This is a good example for that type of page: https://www.moneygram.com/MGIRewards/Change/index.htm.
When a visitor comes to the site if he doesn't have a specific cookie set he'll be redirected to this page to choose his language.
I've already created a RewriteRule in .htaccess utilizing the mod_rewrite cookie based redirect feature and I've got a module with a callback showing the language selection drop down and appropriate theme functions. Plus some SEO things so crawlers don't feel bad.
Is there a need for such module? I've did some research but was not able to find something already contributed that can handle this type of functionality. Please correct me if I'm wrong. All comments are welcome!
Comments
I personally don't like this
I personally don't like this approach. I think a better approach would be to make a best guess as to language or locale using geolocation and/or the Accept-Language header, but have a prominent feature on the standard front page allowing them to change languages/locales if the guess was wrong (or the user is a citizen of country A but currently living in country B or whatever). If the guess is right, the user can see some useful content immediately without having to go through an annoying content-less landing page; if the guess is wrong, the user has to do no more work to see content relevant to their language/locale than they would with a normal landing page.
However, even if you do take the landing page approach and use a form instead of a list of links, I would encourage researching using geolocation and/or Accept-Language to set the default value of the select box to a best guess so that the user is at least saved the annoyance of trying to scroll or search through a list of possibly hundreds of countries or dozens of languages to find their own. Especially a pain for us Americans and our fellow Brits, as usually "United States" or "United Kingdom" are near the bottom of those lists… Sometimes I wish I lived in Afghanistan (though not too often). But at least I'm not Zimbabwean.
The Boise Drupal Guy!
I don't like it either! But
I don't like it either! But that's what they want. I've already suggested the solution with accept-language header - no luck.
But thanks for the head-up about the default value, I'll implement it.
Module Available
Have you looked at this module?
http://drupal.org/project/front
It seems to be exactly what you are looking for
Matix, I need to do exactly
Matix, I need to do exactly this in my project as well! Could you lend me a helping hand and maybe send me some info on the code you used/methods/specific stuff?
I've managed to convince the
I've managed to convince the client they don't need this for the first stage of the project. And for the next stage they didn't wanted it anymore :-)
I could send you some of the source I've wrote in order to solve this problem, including some additions to .htaccess rewrite rules but it doesn't quite work.
This is maybe what you're
This is maybe what you're looking for: https://www.drupal.org/project/language_selection_page
-Pol-