I am trying to figure out the best way to handle external links on pages that need to be different depending on the regional site. I am curious how others have handled this.
Here are some use cases
- Header/Footer - the header and footer are the same for all regional sites and they will go through a localization process when rolled out to each regional site. The only different would be that some links in the header ie: Support would need to be different for each region. Support on the US site might go to www.externalsite.com/USSupport and the Support link on the German site might go to www.externalsite.com/DESupport
- Trial button on a product page - we have product pages that will include a button to a trial. The url for the trial will be different per region
- Urls for iframes in a page - we have some pages where we iframe a form into the page from a different system. The url used in the iframe would be different per regional site.
We have been brainstorming ways to handle this but I am not sure any of these are great solutions.
1. I believe one solution would be to edit each live copy and only break inheritance on the component or button array that needs to have a different link but I am trying to see if there is a programmatic to handle this since we will have over 30 regional sites to manage.
2. I have also considered using a geoip redirect url so that the url on the page would remain the same on all sites and then we just have to maintain the redirect list in an external system
3. Possibly some sort of post processing that can be done to re-write the urls when we do a rollout. This is assuming that the urls follow a specific format so they could be automagically changed.
4. Maybe manually edit the link when they go through our translation processed (still checking with our translations plugin vendor)
Thanks
Mark
