This past week I had a client ask me to look into an issue they were having with their localized content not inheriting the content block's alias for the default language. I have quite a bit of localization background, but to be honest, I had not worked a lot with aliases on localized sites (we never used the built in aliasing with Ektron with the previous localized sites.) The problem was that the page rendering the content block for the default language would work, but when the site language ID was changed, the localized requests would fail (404 errors).
I had begun to write a custom application to manually assign the aliases to the localized content blocks, but found a buried configuration flag within the aliasing modules that resolves this issue.
By default, the disable language awareness flag is "disabled" (ironic). By enabling this flag, the content for the specific language will display based the alias of the default language content block.
- Log in to the work area as administrator
- Browse to Settings | Configuration | Url Aliasing | Settings
- Enter edit mode
- Check the Disable Language Awareness checkbox
- Save your settings
Also keep in mind that if you have multiple aliases for a single content block, you must set the alias you want to cascade down to be the "default" alias or else your localized content blocks will not inherit the desired alias.
Here is the help link reference to enable language aware aliases.
