Magento, store code in URLs and mod rewrite voodoo

Hey there,

I am very stuck at the following problem. My e-commerce site is in Magento. It used to have only one store view i.e. language. Now I want to add a second language. In Magento, you can add a store code to the URL, to make a distinction between the languages.

So where the URL for a specific product used to be like this:

www.myshop.com/myproduct.html

it will now become

www.myshop.com/en/myproduct.html

with 'en' being the english store view.

For Google this means trouble, because as soon as I put these modifications live, Google won't be able to find all currently indexed pages anymore. So what I am looking for is mod rewrite voodoo that does the following:

1. reroute all traffic that comes in with no store code (like 'en') to the 'en' store code
2. do not reroute anything that already has a store code
3. do the rerouting as 'permanent' so Google will know it has to change the old URL's to the new ones

In this article http://www.magentocommerce.com/boards/viewthread/22677/ this is explained. Somebody suggests the following voodoo:

*** start voodoo snippet *****

## redirect do Deutsch if there's no preference in the URL
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(media|skin|js)/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(index.php|de/|fr/|uhu_fr/|k55_de/|k55_en/) #add your own store-views here
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ de/$1 [R,L] #add your preferred default-store view here

*** end voodoo snippet *****

Looks as good voodoo to me, but unfortunately, it leads to a server error (500). It is beyond me why, but I am hoping that somebody out here can point me in the right direction!

Thanks very much in advance!!

Haraldinho

 

www.myshop.com/myproduct.html

how many default pages? are they all in current folder and end in html?


I see it as simple as this
RewriteRule ^(.*?).html$ /en/$1.html [L, R=301]

 

Hi scriptinstaller,

It isn't as easy as that I'm afraid. Magento uses all kind of mechanisms. Not only .html files but also directories. Not everything is in the current folder.

Haraldinho

 

I finally figured out why I got the server error. I had not set the RewriteBase. That wasn't necessary before, but it is now, with these new commands.

The code snippet below shows the rewrite part of my .htaccess file:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

############################################
## enable rewrites

    Options +FollowSymLinks
    RewriteEngine on

############################################
## you can put here your magento root folder
## path relative to web root

    RewriteBase /magento/

############################################
## workaround for HTTP authorization
## in CGI environment

    RewriteRule .* - [E=HTTP_AUTHORIZATION:%{HTTP:Authorization}]


############################################
## the following is used for rewriting old
## URL's without a store code in it to the
## new URL format with store codes

    # If the request does not match an existing file
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
    # and the request does not match an existing directory
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
    # and the request does not match a symbolic link
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l
    # and the request URL does not already contain an existing store code
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !(index.php|nl/|en/)

    #rewrite to the default store view
    RewriteRule ^(.*)$ nl/$1 [R=301,L]
	
	

############################################
## always send 404 on missing files in these folders

    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(media|skin|js)/

############################################
## never rewrite for existing files, directories and links

	# If the request does not match an existing file
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
	
	# and the request does not match an existing directory
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
	
	# and the request does not match a symbolic link
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-l

############################################
## rewrite everything else to index.php
	
    RewriteRule .* index.php [L]

</IfModule>

Code (markup):

Thanks for the help!

Haraldinho