As we continue to refine the multilingual capabilities of our headless Drupal application, it's crucial to know how to set up language prefixes or domains. This ensures that clients and applications receive content in the correct language, enhancing the user experience by providing localized content seamlessly.
Understanding Language Negotiation in Drupal
Drupal provides various methods for language negotiation, meaning it can determine the correct language for displaying content based on several criteria, such as URL paths, session information, or browser settings. Using language prefixes or domains is a powerful way to deliver content optimized for specific linguistic audiences directly from your API.
Why Use Language Prefixes or Domains?
Language prefixes and domains aid in:
- Clear separation of languages within the URLs, improving SEO and user experience.
- Easier integration with language-specific services or third-party tools.
- Intuitive URL structures that enhance usability and navigation.
Setting Up Language URL Prefixes
Step 1: Enable Path-based Language Detection
Navigate to Configuration > Regional and language > Language detection and selection. Ensure that 'URL (Path prefix or domain)' is enabled as a language detection method.
Step 2: Configure URL Prefixes for Languages
Configure prefixes under Configuration > Regional and language > URL language prefixes. Assign each language on your site a unique prefix (e.g., en for English, fr for French).
Step 3: Test URL Prefixes in API Calls
With prefixes set, you can access multilingual content through your API with calls like:
GET /en/jsonapi/node/article
GET /fr/jsonapi/node/article
The above requests point to articles in English and French respectively.
Setting Up Language-Specific Domains
Step 1: Domain Configuration
Consider configuring subdomains for different languages (e.g., en.example.com, fr.example.com). This typically requires DNS configuration and server setup to point subdomains to your Drupal backend.
Step 2: Assign Domains to Languages
Under the same Configuration > Regional and language > Language detection and selection settings, configure domain names for each language.
Step 3: Accessing APIs with Language-Domains
With domain configuration in place, access the APIs using language-specific domains:
GET http://en.example.com/jsonapi/node/article
GET http://fr.example.com/jsonapi/node/article
Note that server and SSL certificates must be correctly configured to accommodate these domain structures.
Best Practices
Tip: Regularly audit and test your language-specific URLs and domains to ensure they're correctly serving content. Also, consider the SEO impact and implement best practices for search engines in multilingual sites.
Conclusion and What’s Next?
Setting up language prefixes or domains is a pivotal strategy in creating a sophisticated multilingual headless Drupal site. It ensures that users receive content in their preferred language efficiently, bolstering engagement and enhancing regional optimization.
In our next lesson, we will explore "Including Language Data in API Responses", focusing on how this data can augment content personalization and client-side logic implementations, further enhancing your site's multilingual robustness.