Adding localizations

Sulu is built for companies with an international focus, so translating pages into multiple different languages is a very important task for a content editor using Sulu. Sulu also considers the different variations of a language among different countries. The combination of these two factors is called a localization.

Configuring webspace localizations

Localizations for the content are configured in the webspaces, as already described in Setup a Webspace. Adding another localization is as easy as adding another localization tag to the webspace configuration file. Localizations can also be nested, which has no impact on the representation in all the dropdowns, but it will help the system to find better fallbacks.

So a good example using english and german as a language might look something like the following fragment.

<localizations>
    <localization language="en">
        <localization language="en" country="us"/>
        <localization language="en" country="gb"/>
    </localization>
    <localization language="de">
        <localization language="de" country="de"/>
        <localization language="de" country="at"/>
        <localization language="de" country="ch"/>
    </localization>
</localizations>

With this configuration the system will contain seven different content localizations: en, en-us, en-gb, de, de-de, de-at, de-ch, whereby en-us and en-gb are falling back to en, and de-de, de-at and de-ch are falling back to de.

After adding localizations in the webspace, note that you need to run

php bin/adminconsole sulu:document:initialize

This will re-initialize the PHPCR content tree, setting up the new locale for accepting new content. Afterwards nobody will have any permissions on this locale, so make sure that you add this permission in the permissions tab of the contacts.

Note

When adding a new localization you have to make sure that the localization is also covered by one of the webspaces URLs. This can either happen by using the language and country attributes of the url tag, or by specifying e.g. the {localization} placeholder. For more information see Setup a Webspace.

Adding custom localizations

There is another possibility for adding non webspace related localizations. More details can be found in How to add localizations with the localization provider?

Usage of localizations

For the developer the only touching points with localizations are the configuration and the eventual use of a language switcher on the homepage. For the language switcher the urls variable delivered to the twig template can be used, which contains an associative array with the localization code being the key and the value the URL to the current page in this language.

The template itself does not have to be adapted for usage with multiple localizations. The twig variables are the same for every language, only the content is different, and this is handled by Sulu for the developer.

The nesting of the localizations is very important for the column navigation of the content. In case there is a ghost page - which means that the page is not translated into the current localization - this tree will be used to determine the “closest” language available.