Usage

Prepare your contexts

After (or before) the installation of LangRouter you have to prepare your contexts.

1. Create one context for each language and name it with the language name. Normally the context key would be equal with the cultureKey context setting of that language, i.e. en as context key and English as context name when the cultureKey is en.
2. Create the context setting base_url in each context and set it to /.
3. Create the context setting cultureKey in each context and set it to the according cultureKey, i.e. en.
4. Optionally create the context setting cultureKeyAliases in each context and set it to a comma-separated list of other culture keys to which this context should respond, i.e. de,nl.
5. For each context create a site_url context setting and fill it with the following value: {url_scheme}{http_host}{base_url}{cultureKey}/. MODX handles the placeholder replacements in that setting on its own.
6. Fill the MODX system setting babel.contextDefault with the context key of the default language, if you did not fill this during the installation of LangRouter.
7. In head section of the template insert the following line <base href="[[!++site_url]]">.
8. Include the static files from the assets folder in your installation with [[++assets_url]]path/to/static_file, i.e. <link href="[[++assets_url]]css/site.css" rel="stylesheet"> or <img src="[[++assets_url]]images/whatever.jpg" … >. You can use [[++base_url]]path/to/static_file, if your assets are not located inside the assets folder.
9. Set the MODX system setting link_tag_scheme to -1 (URL is relative to site_url)

To create these settings easily, you can use the Cross Contexts Settings extra available on MODX Extras.

Example

Example settings for an en context

Context setting	Value
base_url	/
cultureKey	en
cultureKeyAliases	de,nl
site_url	{url_scheme}{http_host}{base_url}{cultureKey}/

System settings

LangRouter uses the following system settings in the namespace langrouter:

Key	Name	Description	Default
langrouter.contextDefault	Default Context	Default Context for LangRouter (supercedes babel.contextDefault system setting).	-
langrouter.contextKeys	Context Keys	Comma-separated list of context keys which should be used to link multilingual resources.	-
langrouter.debug	Debug	Log debug information in MODX error log.	No
langrouter.response_code	Response Code	Response code for the redirect to the right context, if the culture key is not set.	HTTP/1.1 301 Moved Permanently

Redirect loops possible

Please don't activate the friendly_urls_strict MODX system setting, if you use LangRouter. That can cause nasty redirect loops.

Usage with other extras

Some extras settings have to be changed to work well with LangRouter (and other routing plugins):

pThumb

Please set the system setting phpthumbof.cache_url to /. Otherwise, the generated thumbnail path of the snippet/output filter will contain the {base_url}{cultureKey} prefix.

On the other hand, you can add an additional .htaccess rule that removes this prefix. In the following example, you need to change the list of culture keys. It must be inserted before the friendly URLs part:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteRule ^(en|de|fr|nl)/assets(.*)$ assets$2 [L,QSA]