I'm not sure what you are trying to accomplish here..
If you want only one language, I would simple also use only one..?
Why don't you simply remove English as a language?
 

Hi Timo,

Thanks for the response!

First, I wasn't sure that I could - on my test site, I actually tried to disable English under Languages after I had set German to be the default, and the whole site went down. I later found the portal aliases had been deleted, and was able to recreate that manually in the PortalAlias table, but something was still messed up, so I restored from my backup. I wasn't sure if by design it required English to be retained.

Secondly, I would like to keep the English version available for me to more easily provide support when I log in. The German language pack pretty thoroughly replaces all the DNN backend verbiage, and makes it difficult for me to manage. My knowledge of German is pretty minimal.

All of these portals in question are being created by cloning a template originally created in English.

OK - I tried it again on my testing site, and I think I can follow Timo's suggestion to remove English if I follow these steps.

1. Have 2 languages installed and enabled. For this test, I had English first, and I added Spanish-Peru.
2. Make Spanish the Default language.
3. Have my site aliases defined for English and Spanish - in this case I did have unique domains for each.
4. Make careful note of the entries in the PortalAlias table.
5. Disable English.
6. After saving the change, the site tries to load and shows the screenshot below:

7. Checking the PortalAlias table, I see that both aliases for this portal ID have been deleted. 
8. Restore those entries directly in the table. Check the DefaultPortalAlias in the PortalSettings table.
9. Restart the Application under Settings > Servers

I can now pull up the site again, English is gone, and I have access to the site under the correct portal alias.

With Spanish, it doesn't seem to translate most of the DNN back end, so navigating the settings is not a problem

I am surprised about what you say, we change languages and the portal alias all the time to make websites and never have a problem unless the portal alias is wrong.

Do you have Portal Localization on? (We never use that. All our modules work in multiple languages)
Do you have "Auto Add URL" on in the Portal Alias? (We never turn that on)

Posted By David Fenske on 12/9/2024 12:33 PM

Hi DNN Friends,

I'm setting up a number of international-language portals in my current project. There are a couple that will have localized content, but also some that just need a non-English default language. 

For example, the German-language site does not need to have English-language content pages. When I add the DE-DE language pack and set that as the default language, I'm retaining English as the system backup language, but I won't be enabling the content localization. 

When the Site Aliases are configured, to be able to access the pages using the English DNN interface, I have the choice of keeping the same domain name as the primary German version, and allowing the "/en-us/" parameter to be added to access the site using the English localization. I really prefer having each language be a separate domain, eg:  1. german.mysite.com  2. english.mysite.com, and that's easy to set up. However, I'm concerned that I not create SEO duplicate content problems. I suppose I could make sure only the German domain is set to Primay alias and set the Site Alias Mapping Mode to "Canonical"? But then, the client may have multiple aliases they would like redirected to the primary rather than just the "softer" Canonical setting. Or should I just allow the "/en-us/" parameters to be there and disallow crawling of those pages through the robots.txt?   Any suggestions? 

Thanks! David

David, in this scenario you don't have to worry about SEO cannibalization or SEO duplicates; having 3-5 pages inside of a same website targeting the same keywords it's totally different from what you're sharing. You can use either way: (1) sub-domains for each language or (2) implement DNN localization (I recommend you this one).