Using Language cookies

[team_lh_Max]

Hello,

I have a problem
I am trying to build my site multilangual and out of this reason i tried starting with cookies. I found a little tutorial how to use them, but as usual I seem to be too dumb to read proprely 😃.

Anyway what you should know, on my startup page i link the different languages with for example

<a href="index.php?lang=en">English</a>

And only start with PHP in the index file.
In the index.php I included the file "langcheck.php" on top which does the following:

<?PHP

//This file is checking the selected language of a user to output the website in the right language

if(!isset($cookie_language)) {
	if(!isset($_GET['lang'])) {
		$lang = en;
		echo "<font color=\"red\"><strong><center>You did not select your language. By default the website is shown in english now.
			  <br><br>
			  You can change your language <a href=\"http://www.lh-web.com/lhdev\">here</a>.</center></strong></font>";
	} else {
		$lang = $_GET['lang'];
		setcookie(cookie_language, [$lang]);
	}
} else {
	$lang = $cookie_language;
}

?>

Ok now this is the first time I do something similar like this, out of this reason I would be very glad for help, probably you guys see tons of errors, but you know,...N00bs 😛

Hoping to hear from you and thanks a lot in advance
Max

[MarkR]

It's a really bad idea to use a cookie to store the language on pages which need to be indexed by search engines.

The search engine won't have cookie support, so it will only see the pages in a single language - this will adversely affect your search results in other languages (i.e. it won't find them at all).

Personally I'd put it in the URL somewhere, either query string or path info. Our multilingual sites mostly use search-engine friendly URLs and URLs like

/en/somecategory/somepage
/de/somecategory/somepage

Which serve the alternative language versions. Language navigation is available so that the search engines can effectively spider the different language versions.

Mark

[team_lh_Max]

ok that is most likely really a much better idea for the public area.

But in the internal area, how would i do it there? the same way or would another method be better there?