Multilingual by Design

This demo runs in English and German. Not English with a German veneer: each language has its own content directory, its own menu, its own search index, its own feed, and its own set of tags. A post may exist in one language and not the other, which is the normal case rather than an omission to be apologised for.

The shape of it

defaultContentLanguage = "en"
defaultContentLanguageInSubdir = true

[languages.en]
  languageName = "English"
  contentDir = "content/en"
  weight = 1

[languages.de]
  languageName = "Deutsch"
  contentDir = "content/de"
  weight = 2

defaultContentLanguageInSubdir puts every language under a prefix, English included. Nothing lands at the publish root — which is exactly why the theme ships a ROOT404 output format, so the web server still has an error document to serve.

Pairing translations

Two posts become translations of each other by sharing a translationKey, which frees their filenames and their URLs to be idiomatic in each language:

translationKey = "multilingual-by-design"

The title block then grows an Also in row, and the header’s language switch points at this page’s counterpart rather than dumping the reader on the home page. Where there is no counterpart — as on two of the posts in this demo — the switch falls back to that language’s home page, which is the honest answer.

Per-language parameters

Anything under [languages.xx.params] reaches templates as site.Params, already resolved for the current language. That is what makes a genuinely per-language editPost link possible:

[languages.de.params.editPost]
  URL = "https://example.org/-/edit/main/content/de"
  appendFilePath = true

.File.Path is relative to that language’s contentDir, so a single site-wide URL could only ever have been correct for one of the two.

Dates

Set DateFormat = ":date_long" rather than a Go layout string. A layout like January 2, 2006 freezes the month name in one language and will cheerfully print January on a German page; the shorthand resolves per language.