Other languages give 404 page

[cathymarc]

Hi,

I just installed Prestashop and I must say that compared to M****** it is a breeze :-)

I'm running up against a problem that I cannot seem to solve. My install is in english, with 4 extra languages (all installed ok). I use SEO friendly URLs and I have Prestashop installed in a subdirectory called ecommerce (i.e. not in the root).
In english all works ok. Home page in english works (www.xxxxxxxx.com/ecommerce/) but in any other language, the URL throws a 404 (link in home page is for example www.xxxxxxxx.com/ecommerce/lang-fr/).

Any ideas?

many thanks and keep up the excellent product


PS: I a mhosted at OVH 90 plan and have the following .htaccess :

SetEnv REGISTER_GLOBALS 0

# .htaccess automaticaly generated by PrestaShop e-commerce open-source solution
# http://www.prestashop.com - http://www.prestashop.com/forums

# URL rewriting module activation
RewriteEngine on

# URL rewriting rules
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)\-([0-9]+)(\-[a-zA-Z0-9-]*)/([a-zA-Z0-9-]*)\.jpg$ img/p/$1-$2$3.jpg [L,E]
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)(\-[a-zA-Z0-9-]*)/([a-zA-Z0-9-]*)\.jpg$ img/c/$1$2.jpg [L,E]
RewriteRule ^([a-zA-Z0-9-]*)/([0-9]+)\-([a-zA-Z0-9-]*)\.html(.*)$ product.php?id_product=$2$4 [L,E]
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)\-([a-zA-Z0-9-]*)\.html(.*)$ product.php?id_product=$1$3 [L,E]
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)\-([a-zA-Z0-9-]*)(.*)$ category.php?id_category=$1 [QSA,L,E]
RewriteRule ^content/([0-9]+)\-([a-zA-Z0-9-]*)(.*)$ cms.php?id_cms=$1 [QSA,L,E]
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)__([a-zA-Z0-9-]*)(.*)$ supplier.php?id_supplier=$1$3 [QSA,L,E]
RewriteRule ^([0-9]+)_([a-zA-Z0-9-]*)(.*)$ manufacturer.php?id_manufacturer=$1$3 [QSA,L,E]

# Catch 404 errors
ErrorDocument 404 /ecommerce/404.php

[cathymarc]

Anyone there :-)))

Normal, it's august !

[mayday]

I have this same problem on 1.2.1 that I just started trying to get set up.

Turning on the SEO friendly URL's breaks my translations.

Experience this feature yourself at my open development environment:

http://www.campfire.ch/store1_2_1/

or, if you want to buy some climbing gear go to my live store running PS1.1.0.5 at www.outdoorstore.ch

[cathymarc]

Interesting.

Looking at some of the showcase live shops ( http://www.prestashop.com/en/showcase_liveshops ) with multiple languages AND friendly URLs turned on, it seems that there are 3 cases, all working (but how did they solve them?).
1) sites where the default "lang-xx/" directory gets introduced just ahead of the rest of the request
2) sites same as above but where the "lang-xx/"" has somehow been modified to "xx/" alone (that would be nice to do!)
3) sites where there is no indication of language in the URL, but require the use of different category and product names

What is maddening is that the language information is present ONLY when you are changing languages. This means that UNLESS you give different names to categories and products, the same URL is used for any language, making multilingual indexing very difficult indeed. And even if you take care of the identical URLs by changing category names, the Home page remains a problem, because all languages have the same home page index.php! This business of hiding the language (resumably by installing cookies in the receiving browser) is a real SEO killer for multilingual sites.

Back to my problem, it is clear that the .htaccess file (which I found in another thread) is faulty.
For one, there are some E flags that serve no purpose (E requires defining a variable! here there is no variable).
And some QSA flags that serve no purpose since with friendly URLs you will never get query strings!
I am trying some changes, but it is clear that this SEO friendly stuff has not been fully tested, or I would not have to start writing mod_rewrites...

bye

[cathymarc]

SOLVED (in part)

the .htaccess file I had was wrong, I got it from a thread on this forum.
At first I got it working by changing .htaccess myself, then discovered the .htaccess generator !!! The result was similar...

There are still severe shortcoming from a multilingual SEO perspective, that may not be easily solved. I am starting a new thread on this.

EVERYTHING else works truly wonderfully, many times faster and easier than M****o, and easily updated. With better SEO features, this would be THE top ecommerce solution in the world!

One little thing, it took me a while to find the small cllickable line on the Product administration that allows you to expand and thus change the Friendly URL and the metas.... THAT SHOULD ALWAYS BE EXPANDED, the same way as for the Category administration.

[mayday]

Re-generating the .htaccess file, while SEO Friendly URLs was turned on in the BO fixed this problem for me

Many thanks to Cathymarc!!

[prestaaa]

Just a reminder because I forgot and wasted couple hours wondering. I was messing around with languages and was still getting 404's after reloading htaccess - my problem was I forgot to clear the browser cache file.