Magento's core implementation of store view selection logic leaves a bit to be desired, but as you found out your solution is heavy-handed and has several knock-on effects.
There are several extensions which handle this functionality for you. Outside of moral opposition to using third-party extensions you should look into those as well-tested modifications with dedicated support.
If you want to build this yourself though you should start with an event observer on controller_action_predispatch
which is fired on every request.
I ended up in using the below solution. I saw it is a quite common configuration for multi-language Magento websites.
This solution provides a default language with a redirect from "normal" url (urls without lang subfolder) to urls with the default lang subfolder.
For example, if it
is the default language, it happen this:
example.com/ --> example.com/it/
example.com/contact --> example.com/it/contact
...
1) Create store views with lang code
- Go to Stores > All Stores.
- Create a Store View for each language.
- Set in the Code field the language code.
- Example: I have two store views, Italiano with code "it" (default view) and English with code en.
2) Enable the Add Store Code to Urls option
3) Set a default language redirect in the .htaccess
Open the .htaccess
and search for these lines:
############################################
## never rewrite for existing files, directories and links
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
Then place the following lines just before the above ones:
############################################
## redirects for urls without lang dir to default lang (it)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(it|en|admin\w*|soap|rest)($|/.*$)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /it/$1 [L,R=301]
These lines will redirect all urls without language subfolder to the same url with default subfolder /it
at the beginning:
example.com/contact --> example.com/it/contact
Urls starting with en/
, admin
, soap/
, rest/
are not redirected.
You can customize it, changing the default language subfolder and adding other ignored urls (at least one for each language code you have).
4) Redirect the root to default language subdir
In the .htaccess
search for these lines:
############################################
## enable rewrites
Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
Then place the following lines just after:
############################################
## redirect root to default lang (it)
RedirectMatch 301 ^/$ /it/
Drawbacks
I used this solution and it's working good for me. The only really drawback I have experienced is that the .htaccess
is rewritten each time I update Magento, so I have to restore it after the updating.
Another drawback can be if you have a multiple website configuration and several websites with the same languages as pointed out in a comment to this answer: https://magento.stackexchange.com/a/197/38275
Best Answer
First Move
app/code/core/Mage/Core/Model/Config.php
toapp/code/local/Mage/Core/Model/Config.php
Now open
app/code/local/Mage/Core/Model/Config.php
and find method called loadModulesConfiguration and add the following code to make the method look like this.Now Edit your
module.xml
file