EXT: cs_IP2Language¶

What does it do?¶

The cs_IP2Language extension uses the free database by MaxMind to determine the country of residence for visitors based on their IP address.

The extension will make sure every visitor browses the correct language for his country of residence. So for example certain languages can be denied to users from specified countries.

Users manual¶

The cs_IP2Language extension is an include only extension and provides no GUI whatsoever.

Detailed workflow¶

The cs_IP2Langauge extension is included as library upon every pagerequest.

On every page request the extension checks if a languagedetection should be done. This depends on the setup. It is possible to deactivate the languagedetection via TypoScript or specify that the detection should only be done on the first hit of the homepage or even only on specified pages.

If a languagedetection should be done the extension tries to find the country of residence for the requesting IP.

If the country can be determined – the IP is found in the MaxMind geoIP database – the extension reads its TypoScript configuration and looks for a LanguageID configured for the country determined in step 2. If there is no LanguageID configured for the detected country the defined default language will be used.

The extension checks whether the currently requested language is equal to the LanguageID found in step 3. If that is the case no action is performed.

Otherwise a link to the current page with the detected languageparameter is build and a Location Redirect header is sent to the browser.

Configuring country languages¶

Currently the most important option to configure the extension is to embed the static template in the Template at “Include Static (from Extension)” and provide languageUIDs for certain country ISOCodes.

The ISOCodes ↔ Language mapping is done via TypoScript setup.The cs_IP2Language uses the two-letter ISO 3166 standard to identify countries by default.

plugin.tx_csip2language_pi1 {
             defaultLanguage = 0
             country.languages {
                     EN = 0
                     DE = 1
             }
     }

Disable IP2Language language detection¶

It might be useful to have the extension disabled on some pages or even pagetrees.If thats the case the “disable” constant within the constant editor has to be enabled or the following line has to be added to the TS Setup:

plugin.tx_csip2language_pi1.disable = 1

Disable IP2Language language detection for robots¶

It might be useful to have the extension disabled for robots (default).If this option is enabled the HTTP_USER_AGENT is checked agains a database with some names of robots. These database entries could be edit or supplemented within the list-view. The database is based on ”The Robots Database” http://www.robotstxt.org/db.html .To enable the language detection even for robots the “disableforbots” constant within the constant editor has to be disabled or the following line has to be added to the TS Setup:

plugin.tx_csip2language_pi1.disableforbots = 0

Detect language only on first hit¶

It might be useful to preselect the language only on the first hit of the homepage. Otherwise the visitor won't be able to change the language, because the detection would redirect the user to the autodetected language on every page load.If set a session variable is written at the first language detection. If this session variable is set, no further detections and redirects are made.If the language should be detected on every page load, the “detectonfirsthitonly” constant within the constant editor has to be disabled or the following line has to be added to the TS Setup:

plugin.tx_csip2language_pi1.detectonfirsthitonly = 0

Detect language only on specified pages¶

It might be useful to detected the language only on specified pages, e.g. homepage.If this is the case a comma separated list of the page UIDs, where the detection should be done, has to be set to the “detectonpages” constant within the constant editor.If a detection should be done on every page detectonpages has to be 0 (default).

If the language detection should only work on the pages with the UIDs 5, 12 and 89:
     plugin.tx_csip2language_pi1.detectonpages = 5,12,89

Reference¶

The MaxMind geoIP country database¶

The extension relies on the geoIP country database from MaxMind, available freely on http://www.maxmind.com

The database is licensed under the open data license.

The database is updated on a regular basis, so a cronjob should be configured to download the current database once in a while. This is the only way to make sure the IP to country mapping of the extension is always up to date and generates as much correct results as possible.

As of now the most recent geoIP database can be obtained here:

http://geolite.maxmind.com/download/geoip/database/GeoLiteCountry/Geo IP.dat.gz

It has to be downloaded and gunziped to the 'geodata' subdirectory of the extension directory.

A shellscript (updategeodata.sh) to do this is stored in the 'geodata' subdirectory of the extension directory.This script requires wget and gunzip. Make sure that this script is executable (chmod 755)!To regulary update the GeoIP.dat a cronjob should be set up:

Update GeoIP.dat at 3 a every night.

 3 * * * * sudo -u WEBUSER /PATH/TO/WEBDIR/typo3conf/ext/cs_ip2language/geodata/updategeodata.sh

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