I have a site that will ultimately support 4 languages and 2 countries (US & Canada, English and Spanish)
I'm wondering what's the best way to set up the directory structure?
Right now, I have a root site called site.com:
This will take you to a page where you choose your country and language.
Ideally, I want to have the directory like so:
site.com/ca/en/ (Canada English)
site.com/ca/fr/ (Canada French)
site.com/us/en/ (US English)
site.com/us/es/ (US Spanish)
But that will mean I will be putting a "ca" and a "us" virtual directory and language virtual directories inside that. IS that good practice, or should I do something like:
site.com/ca-en/ (Canada English)
site.com/ca-fr/ (Canada French)
site.com/us-en/ (US English)
site.com/us-es/ (US Spanish)
edit: I have done the following:
There is a dummy directory: /ca/ and /us/ in the application. They both have a default.aspx which is just a redirect. In my case, I redirect them to their English language sites:
For example: site.com/ca/ --> site.com/ca/en/ site.com/us/ --> site.com/us/en/
if site.com is entered, you are pushed to a language selection page. Basically, I use a regular expression in Global.asax on every request to look for the language/culture string.
This has the following benefits. Country separation. So you have control over site.com/ca/ or site.com/us/ and are able to provide a simple URL for each country.
Anyway, the Virtual directories /en/, /fr/ and /es/ are inside their respective country physical folders.
So you have the following (Virtual Dirs are in bold):
site.com/ca/en/ (default) site.com/ca/fr/ site.com/us/en/ (default) site.com/us/es/
What this means is that you need to have five (identical) applications, except you can use the URL to get the current language and country (and point it to the right database).
Well, they want the Url to be different for each site.
Essentially it is actually one site (for maintenance reasons) and we're using globalization to determine which connection string to use (different databases, identical structures in each one)
Each time we publish I'll publish to four locations. Identical app.
Globalization using one URL SOUNDS like a good idea, but I don't think it will spider properly, and even if it does, doesn't offer a good bookmarkable link. (French person sends link to another french person using an computer set to English). There are other implications, but there is a reason sites like apple and microsoft use different urls for each language/culture.
On each Session start, I check the url, and set the connection strings accordingly.
IN THE END, i just put a /ca/ and /us/ directory in the main application, add some virtual directories to each language do a reponse redirect to the "choose a language" page.
Perhaps not the best solution, but it seems to be working.
Another benefit of doing it this way is if there is some special page that only applies to one site, it can be added to that site only.