Using a different domain name for each language

Drupal makes it easy to serve different language versions of your websites from different domains.

This allows you, for example, to have English contents in www.yourdomain.com and Spanish contents in spanish.yourdomain.com.

Different languages can be in subdomains or completely different domains, including different top level domains (TLDs).

To do this, you'll need to setup Drupal to serve different languages in different domains and you'll also need to setup your web server to point all domains to the same Drupal site.

Setup in Drupal

1) Go to /admin/settings/language/configure and select "Domain name only" as the Language negotiation.

domain name configure

2) Go to the language administration page, /admin/settings/language and edit each language to include the domain name

For English:

English language domain

For Spanish:

Spanish Language Configure

Setup in the server configuration file

Once you've set up Drupal to serve differnt languages in different domains, you need to instruct your web server to send requests from multiple domains to the same Drupal site.

In Apache, you'll need to edit the .conf file and add aliases to all the different domains. For example:

ServerName www.yourdomain.com
ServerAlias spanish.yourdomain.com

In addition to this, you'll also need to point the domain name server (DNS) to your server for all the domain names in different languages.

Comments

Domain name only multilingual setup does not seem to fully work

by Anonymous - 09/14/2011 - 11:04

I am sure I have missed a configuration step but I have been unable to find it. I have detailed what I have done here - https://drupal.org/node/1278870.

I have setup other bilingual sites using Drupal using 'path prefix only' and it 'just works' (at the simplest level) but having setup a 'Domain name only' site I can't seem to get it to work properly.

A very simple (additional) example: if I go to the login page (/user/login) on the default (English) URL the page is (as expected) in English. If I go to the Spanish URL everything is still in English. Or another, even more fundamental example - the Spanish home page is in English.

This has never happened to me before, as I say, using the 'path prefix' approach.

Any thoughts/comments?

Thanks

Adam

Path prefix field should be empty

by Anonymous - 01/19/2011 - 22:35

Thanks for this tutorial.

I suppose there is an error in your setup for the spanish language. The path prefix field should be empty, otherwise you get an error.

In my setup I didn't need a ServerAlias for the sites (two domain names, shared database, switched by TLD). Both domains point to the same server root and are using the same settings.php.

Kind regards,

Frank

Secondary language domain falls to "default" web

by Anonymous - 10/28/2010 - 10:31

I have a multisite Drupal configuration.
For each subsite I want a two language versions depending on the domain. Not the subdomain but top-level-domain.

The subsite is configured for foo.example.cz and via language setup I made a second language version accessible via foo.example.sk

Anytime I access foo.example.sk I get a default drupal site not the slovak version of foo.example.cz

Any hints? Does this procedure work just for sub domains?

--
Rado1
rado (at) rado1 (dot) cz

Worth a tweet

by Anonymous - 08/10/2010 - 08:37

Dude, your article certainly deserves a tweet. I'll add a reference to it in my "configuring drupal for multiple languages" tutorial series, here:

http://www.isegura.es/blog/drupal-multiple-languages-part-one-core-confi...

Also check out Translation Management

by icanlocalize - 08/10/2010 - 08:46

While you're at it and writing a guide, have a look at Translation Management.

It replaces the Translation Overview module and builds a whole new level of management for the translation process.

Enjoy!

multilanguage, domaines and admin interface

by Anonymous - 05/15/2009 - 13:15

I've got a setup with i18n and 2 domain names for 2 different languages. Works great.

However I've also imported the drupal translation for these 2 languages. Now I'm not able to English as admin-interface language for my foreign language.

I know it should be able to keep the two languages (frontend-backend) apart but it doesn't seem to work (the last checkbox at admin/settings/language/i18n is unchecked and the language in my account is also set correctly).

Could it be that it is impossible to do this when domain names are used as language selector?

multisite multilanguage multidomaine

by Anonymous - 09/08/2009 - 06:37

I've created a multisite : http://www.wezbe.com
I've created a subsite with UK language http://phonecards.wezbe.com.

How can I create the subsite with french translation with this url : http://telecartes.wezbe.com ?

Thanks