mklarmann/multilingual

A sketch of what multilingual support in Jekyll looks like

Multilingual Jekyll

A rough draft. The goal is to create a sustainable architecture to manage a site in more than one language.

The current architecture looks like this:

1. Each Jekyll post includes a date with time stamp in its front matter that matches a translated one

2. Interface elements that require translation are set up in the front matter of its template:

    ---
    translations:
      en:
        post-title: 'Posts'
      es:
        post-title: 'Mensajes'
    ---
   

They are then accessed like <h3 class='label'>{{page.translations.[page.lang].post-title}}</h3> where [page.lang] is a ISO 2 Letter Language code defined in each post.

3. Urls are structured as permalink: /:categories/:title and as such, each post must match a category structure in its front matter that looks something like:

    categories:
     - en
     - blog
   

Where the first value is the letter language code followed by any others required.

Cons

• In the language dropdown you need to iterate over {{ for posts in site.posts }} which could get expensive to generate.
• Ensuring categories are set up in the right order is wacky.
• Ensuring the translated post has the same date with timestamp is wacky.

TODOs

• Drop the category per post requirement and derive this from the folder structure?