Multilingual site - is it possible?

voble

There is a need to have the site in two languages.
Is there a way to have a language switcher which switches pre-set variables for example? Or maybe there's an more elegant way to do that?

mad

voble Unfortunately that is not supported out of the box for now. I could imagine that it will be implemented somewhere in the future. But you can have separate pages at the top level for each language.

voble

Got it. Thanks for the reply!

mad

voble Hi, version 1.1.0 just got released. Session variables are now supported. You can find a basic tutorial about developing a multilingual site here.

voble

hey, thats great! thanks for improving the system constantly, I'm excited to give this feature a try.

ThomasHelzle

Hey mad,

we're currently evaluating Automad as our new CMS since switching to PHP 7 is a problem with GetSimpleCMS and many of it's no longer supported plugins.
We like what we see a lot, there are many clever ideas in your system, but when we started a test implementation yesterday, we found that the multilingual support seems a bit limited compared to i18n in GS.
In your tutorial example you only change the text of one textfield on the fly. On our sites, we also need to translate all menu entries and also the texts for most images in the many "Galleria.io" galleries.
We could probably somehow solve this with a german and an english entry for each and every text/title/etc. on the site and then switch between them individually as you do in the tutorial, but we first wanted to get back to you if this is the way it's supposed to be done or if there is a more clever approach.
We're not exactly PHP wizards, so some guidance how you would approach something like this would be very much appreciated. If we know the direction we can probably hack it together ourselves :-)

Thank you very much!

Cheers,

Tom

P.S. For reference, this is the current site with GetSimpleCMS: https://www.screendream.de/

mad

ThomasHelzle

Hi,

yes, it basically works like in the tutorial. But that is just a very simple example. If you have multiple variables to be translated, you would better handle the language switch in one little snippet file (for example snippets/language.php) and include that one into each template as follows:

<@ if @{ %lang } = "de" @> 
    <@ set {
        ":title": @{ titleGerman },
        ":text": @{ textGerman }
     } @> 
<@ else @> 
    <@ set {
        ":title": @{ title },
        ":text": @{ text }
    } @> 
<@ end @>

The snippet above sets runtime variables for the title and the text of a page. Within a template you would then just use the switch like this:

<@ snippets/language.php @> 
@{ :text }

Note that you need to call that snippet also when changing the context like in a foreach loop.

ThomasHelzle

Thanks mad,

would such a snippet in each template then also work for the creation of the menu without further ado (by each page providing the correct language title etc. this way) or does that need special handling somehow?

I do not follow what you mean with "changing the context like in a foreach loop"?

We also looked at "Grav" as a CMS and while it's totally overdone and way too heavy for our needs, the way they handle the multilingual aspect appeals to me: https://learn.getgrav.org/content/multi-language#multi-language-basics
The basic principle of this could probably be implemented in Automad too, since the mechanisms and file structures are very similar. They basically have a list of languages in their settings file:

languages:
  supported:
    - en
    - de

And then the pages are named default.en.md and default.de.md (would be default.en.txt and default.de.txt in Automad), both living in the same folder and being chosen by the usual mechanisms.
To me this sounds as if it would fit the very clear and light approach of Automad very well.

Cheers,

Tom

mad

The implementation of the snippet I mentioned above is actually quite simple and lightweight. And yes you can create also menus and navigations like that. Let's say your pages all have a title and a text variable and you want to support English and German. Then you create a snippet file with the language switch as described above and use it always before you use the related variables. The only difference to normal templates is that you use the runtime variables like @{ :title } instead of @{ title }.

The current page content:

<@ snippets/language.php @> 
...
<h1>@{ :title }</h1>
<div>@{ :text | markdown }</div>

And a menu you would create like this:

<@ newPagelist { type: 'children', context: '/' } @> 
<@ foreach in pagelist @> 
    <@ snippets/language.php @>.  
    <a href="@{ url }">@{ :title }</a>
<@ end @>

ThomasHelzle

Awesome!
Thanks a ton mad!

I got my first template working already based on my old php template for GetSimpleCMS, so will implement the menu next.

Cheers,

Tom

mad

Great! ?

ThomasHelzle

We got it all working now.
It was a bit of a pain to find a workaround for the way you handle the main home/index page as sitting on top of everything else and not showing up in the menu - in the end we decided to duplicate it on level 1, this way, our previous structure works as we need it and we don't have to mess with all kinds of manual overwrites. For the user it doesn't matter...

Other than that we can already begin to transfer the content to the new system and should be up and running sometime next week.

One issue we hit was that our local Apache server was crashing from the moment we introduced the language.php (see below) - but only when running PHP 5.6, not with PHP 7. Any idea why that could be the case? We do all this because we need to move to PHP 7 anyway, but it would be good to know it's not something wrong with our code...

<?php defined('AUTOMAD') or die('Direct access not permitted!'); ?>
<@ if @{ %lang } = "de" @>
    <@ set {
        ":title": @{ titleDeutsch },
        ":menu": @{ menuDeutsch },
        ":inhalt": @{ textDeutsch },
        ":gallery": @{ imagesDeutsch }
     } @>
<@ else @>
    <@ set {
        ":title": @{ titleEnglish },
        ":menu": @{ menuEnglish },
        ":inhalt": @{ textEnglish },
        ":gallery": @{ imagesEnglish }
    } @>
<@ end @>

Cheers,

Tom

mad

You can also just add the homepage to a menu or list by using the with statement. No need to duplicate it.
And the language snippet looks fine. Maybe there is a configuration issue with PHP 5.6?

ThomasHelzle

Yeah, we had a workaround like that in place, but our whole structure is a bit different and it became a bit of a pain.
The duplicated homepage is working and for the moment we can live with it.
We just didn't want a page above all others and that seems to be a hardcoded part of Automad?

We'll investigate a bit more into the server crash but since it does not happen with PHP 7, we hope it's not something sever.

Thank you so much for all your help!

Cheers,

Tom

mad

You‘re welcome. The structure just reflects the directory tree. That’s it. It is kind of a natural thing for a file-based CMS. The with statement just before a foreach loop would therefore be the cleanest approach.
Another option would be an alias on the first level. You can create an empty page and redirect it to the homepage by using the url setting.

ThomasHelzle

Thanks - but for us it would actually be better to be able to redirect/alias from the home/index page on level0 to our duplicate on level1, but that seems to be not available in the interface? Is this possible too?

Cheers,

Tom

ThomasHelzle

I have another problem today:
On my privacy policy page, I have a lot of text, both german and english switched with the language.php snippet. When I navigate to it, it doesn't show the text of the privacy page, but of a different page one level up and below the privacy page. It also tries to use the other variables from that wrong page. All other pages work as expected. They all have much less text.
Now I wonder: Is there some kind of memory limit to the :variables? Since I'm writing the full text of the privacy policy to such a :variable for the multilingual switch, is it possible it somehow fails and our snippet doesn't get executed correctly?
I'm a bit lost how to debug this - any idea what to look for?
It isn't a cache problem as far as I can determine, I cleared the cache of both browsers I tried it in and have the automad cache disabled...

Thanks for any hint,

Cheers,

Tom

ThomasHelzle

This is getting worse and worse.
I now started to create more pages (15 ATM) and now suddenly the first page (Home/Index) and the copy of it that used to work just fine show the content of the last page I created.
The content of the textfiles is correct, but somehow it seems that something is getting stuck in Automad and/or the multilingual code. But since it's only on some of the pages, I'm lost what to look for.
Any ideas are welcome. And above question still stands.

Thanks and Cheers,

Tom

mad

Hi,
it is for sure not an issue with the CMS itself. When pages are somehow mixed up then there is a problem in the logic of your templates. You are probably changing the context in the wrong place. And note that the only memory limit you have is the memory limit of your websever. It should be almost impossible to reach that limit with text.
However without seeing your template files it is difficult to identify the issue.