Wordpress Rewrite Rule to enforce default lang code in URL

Question

I am running a WP Blog with qtranslate. It allows me to create posts in multiple languages.

1 . Example URL without qtranslate:

www.mysite.com/post1

2 . Example URL with localized content:

www.mysite.com/**en**/post1 (english - my default and fallback)
www.mysite.com/**de**/post1

Unfortunately search engines etc. still remember my old links (1.) and these are still access-able. So "www.mysite.com/post1" now shows my english content without a redirect. But what it should do is to 301 users to "www.mysite.com/en/post1".

So now I would need a rule that basically checks if there is /en/post1 or a /de/post1 in the URL and otherwise redirect to the fallback /en/post1 URL. There is one exception because "/shop" is a real subdirectory and does not need to be preceeded by language information.

-- UPDATE --

I did it!!! That was actually fun but took me quite a while to figure out.

RewriteRule ^$ en [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^([a-z]{2})/{1}$ $1 [R=301,L]
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9\-\_]{3,})(/|$)$ en/$1 [R=301,L]

There are probably better ways to do this but it does the trick. Thanks everyone for the initial help!

Looking for "en", "de", etc. looks like a bad idea, it could be hard to mantain. You already have one exception, more may come, and it doesn't look pretty. — Camilo Martin
Camilo, you are right. It is not pretty - I just simply don´t know enough about Rewrites to make it work properly! — EasyEl

Rick Rick · Accepted Answer · 2012-02-10T04:43:46

Have you tried using a universal RewriteRule, and using RewriteConds to eliminate the cases that you don't want it to rewrite?

It would go something like:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/shop(/|$)
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/(en|de)(/|$)
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ /en/$1 [R=301]

But as per Camilo's suggestion, you could change that middle line to

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/[a-z]{2}(/|$)

as long as you can ensure that your post permalinks won't be less than three characters (I'm not familiar enough with WordPress to be sure if that's possible).

Wordpress Rewrite Rule to enforce default lang code in URL

3 Answers