Multilingual deployment
Deployment of multilingual sites can be centralized, running out of single environment, or decentralized where locales are served from different environments.
Centralized deployment
In a centralized deployment, all locales are served from the same environment and all of the localized content is syndicated. Web server mappings to each locale home page should be created, either as domains or as paths. These mappings provide easily remembered URLs for users to link to a localized version of the site.
- Use a single domain name
- When using a single domain name, each path is mapped to the home page in a localized library, using URLs like http://mydomain/en or http://mydomain/es for different localities.
- Use multiple domain names
- When using multiple domain names, each domain is mapped to the home page in a localized library, using URLs like http://mydomain.com or http://mydomain.com.es for different localities.
Your localized navigation links should change the domain, not just the path, and should use a fully qualified path, not a relative path.
Decentralized deployment
In a decentralized deployment, locales are served from separate environments, one per environment, or potentially multiple locales per environment. Multiple domains must be used, where each locale or combination of locales is served from it's own domain.
- When implementing a decentralized deployment, users either switch between localized content on an item by item basis, or users select the locale to use and are taken to the home page for that locale.
- To support a decentralized environment, we need to have all content in all locales deployed to every locale environment. The navigation code can then check which content is available before rendering links, and the user can navigate to that localized version without losing their session.
- If this is an anonymous site, we can redirect to the localized version of a site on another server. This requires fully qualified links to be generated.
Locale home page navigation
If the site only requires a link to go to the home page of each locale instead of item-by-item navigation, we can create links in the site that navigate to your other servers. The advantage of implementing the site this way is that we do not need to deploy all content to all servers. You only need the content for the locale you intend to serve out of that environment and any shared assets.The links to the other localized domains need to be hard coded because these links cannot be automatically generated.