Benjamin

Multi-Language

Benjamin supports multi-language websites using sub-directories URL structure. If you enable the multi-langauge support you will have, out of the box, something like this:

http://example.com       --> Website in the default language
http://example.com/en    --> Website in English language
http://example.com/fr    --> Website in French language

The subdirectories en and fr will be respectively the root for the website in English and the website in French. At the web site root will be served the website in your default language.

If properly used, this method allow your website to be correctly indexed by search engines on all available languages.

Enable Multi-Langauge Support

You can enable the Benjamin’s multi-langauge support simply adding language folders inside the resources/lang directory. Each folder should be a supported language:

/resources
  /lang
    /en
      messages.php
    /es
      messages.php
    /fr
      messages.php

Within each language specific folder you should put a messages.php file containing language strings.

Learn more about the lang folder and language strings in Laravel from here.

Note: if the multi-language is enabled, the language sub-directory name will always take precedence over views’ names. So if you have, for example, the folder resources/lang/en and also a view /en.blade.php, this last one will always be ignored (if ‘en’ is not the default locale) and for the url /en will be served the /index.blade.php view with en as locale (and not /en.blade.php).

Configurations

Open the config/app.php configuration file and set these values:

Translated Texts Inside Views

You can use the trans helper function to translate messages inside your views. For example:

<h1></h1>

Will print the string with key welcome inside the messages.php file for the current locale.

Take a look at the Laravel’s documentation for more features about how to use trans function and messages.

If you enable the multi-language support, you have to properly handle links in your web pages to be coherent with the current language.

You can use the trlink helper function for links, inside Blade’s views, in this way:

<a href="">About</a>
<a href="">Page 2</a>
<a href="">Example</a>

Absolute paths (e.g. /about) are translated for the current language, automatically prepending the language subdirectory. Relative paths (e.g. page1) are translated to absolute paths where the root is the language subdirectory. Absolute urls (e.g. http://www.example.com) are left as they are.

So, if the current locale is en (and it is not set as default) and the current page is /some/page1, then the three links above will be translated to:

<a href="/en/about">About</a>
<a href="/en/some/page2">Page 2</a>
<a href="http://www.example.com">Example</a>

Switch Language

In the frontend you may want to provide a way for the user to switch the language. You can do it with a link for each language you support.

Use the langswitch helper function to create links for switching languages on the current page:

<a href="" data-bj-ignore >English</a>
<a href="" data-bj-ignore >Spanish</a>

Supposing the current page is /about and the default language is es, the code above will produce these links:

<a href="/en/about" data-bj-ignore >English</a>
<a href="/about" data-bj-ignore >Spanish</a>

Note that you don’t have to give the current page to langswitch, it will be automatically deduced on each page.

The data-bj-ignore attribute will tell to Benjamin.js to ignore these links from the “on-client” navigation. When a user will click one of these links the website will be reloaded from the server in the selected language.

Get active language

Within views you can get the active language with the $activeLang variable:

@if ($activeLang == 'en')
  <!-- ... -->
@endif

Next: Website Deployment