SEO PRO and language in Elxis 2008.1

Elxis CMS has the best Search Engines Friendly URLs you could imagine in an open source content management system. We call this advanced URL rewrite mechanism SEO PRO. In Elxis 2008.1 SEO PRO became even better in the way it handles language in multi-lingual web sites.

SEO PRO upgrade

In Elxis 2008.0 the current selected language is stored in a cookie variable. No special flag exist in the URLs and the URLs are clean without any language information. Although this method works fine for humans there is problem with search engines as they use to add the mylang=language_name string in URLs. A workarround to this problem is to prevent search engines from listing content for the non-default languages.

Elxis 2008.1 solves this problem. SEO PRO adds automatically a language indication in the URLs for the non-default languages. The content for the non-default languages is placed in virtual sub-folders named as the ISO639 2-letter language code. Here is an example of the same SEO PRO URL for various languages:

http://www.mysite.com/links/ (link to component weblinks for the default language)
http://www.mysite.com/fr/links/ (link to component weblinks for the French language)
http://www.mysite.com/es/links/ (link to component weblinks for the Spanish language)

The language module and it's Smart Language Switch also updated to follow the new SEO PRO rewrite mechanism. You can see this system in action in Elxis Downloads Center. We tried to make this upgrade as easiest as possible for the existing Elxis 2008.0 sites. The result is that you can apply the new SEO PRO by replacing just three files! There is also no need to update any SEO PRO extension even for third party components!

Elxis SEF technology historical data.

Elxis 2006.x
No special SEF solution exist. Elxis has the old Mambo's SEF mechanism (SEO Basic) not officially supported.

Elxis 2008.0
Elxis Introduces SEO PRO as an advanced built-in SEF solution. SEO PRO generates completely static looking URLs and can be expanded to third party components by installing additional SEO PRO extensions. SEO PRO is also backwards compatible to the SEO Basic. The whole CMS is optimized for SEO PRO in order for the SEF links to be generated fast as light.

Elxis 2008.1
SEO PRO upgraded for better language handling in multi-lingual websites. A 2-letter ISO 639 language code is used as a permanent flag in the URLs to declare the current language. Content for the non-default languages is placed in a virtual folder named as the 2-letter language code (i.e. en/, fr/, etc).