footer links multilingual

Question

What will be the best way for multilingual footer links? I have a shop with 2 languages (english and german). For the footer links I have 2 static blocks with the links in it. 1 block is for the german links (and they link to CMS Pages) and one for the english links (who link to other CMS Pages). So far this works great. The problem comes when you are on one of this CMS Pages and wanna switch the language. Cause the CMS Pages dont have the same url it can't switch to the other language version.

For example:

We have the link company that links to shop.com/company

And the same link in german would be Unternehmenthat links to shop.com/unternehmen

When you now are on one of this pages and wanna switch the language you will find yourself on the 404 page. 1 solution would be to give both CMS Pages the same URL with a different StoreView. But how would I do it if I wanna keep the url in the specific language?

Answer 1

I solved this issue by creating url rewrites with 301 redirects.
Let's take your example for 'company'

EN: company
DE: unternehmen

Go to Catalog->Url Rewrite Management and add 2 url rewrites.
First one states that for the DE store company should redirect to unternehmen.
Click on 'New Url Rewrite', select 'Custom' in the next screen and fill in these fields:

Store       : Select the DE store
ID Path     : Just fill in a unique value here 'company_unternehmen_de' for example
Request Path: company
Target Path : unternehmen
Redirect    : 301 Permanent
Description : Not important you can leave it blank

Do the same thing for the En store but switch company and unternehmen in the field values.

This solution works if you have only a few pages in this situation but it gets crazy if you have a lot of them and specially if you have a lot of store views.
So in order to avoid "monkey work" I built myself a monkey.
Check this extension.
It basically does the same thing as described above but your work is simplified.
All you need to do is use the UI of the extension and fill in the url keys for the similar pages in each language. The URL rewrites will be created automatically.
An explanation on how to use and examples can be found here

Answer 2

There's a great answer on Stackoverflow about this issue using URL rewrites. In the backend go to catalog > url rewrite and create a 301 redirect for the different URLs. One from English to German and one from German to English.