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?

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 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 .

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

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/

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 @> if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } 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 } if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } Note that you need to call that snippet also when changing the context like in a foreach loop.

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 if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } 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

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> if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); } And a menu you would create like this: <@ newPagelist { type: 'children', context: '/' } @> <@ foreach in pagelist @> <@ snippets/language.php @>. <a href="@{ url }">@{ :title }</a> <@ end @> if(window.hljsLoader && !document.currentScript.parentNode.hasAttribute('data-s9e-livepreview-onupdate')) { window.hljsLoader.highlightBlocks(document.currentScript.parentNode); }

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

Multilingual site - is it possible?

ThomasHelzle

Ok, that's good to know, I'll have to look into the logic again then, but the curious thing is, that if I remove the long text from the privacy page, everything works just fine, switching languages and all, so it's not as if the logic itself is presenting any problems, only if the text is getting longer it starts to act up...
If I can't find what's wrong, I'll post a link to my template later.

Thanks and Cheers,

Tom

ThomasHelzle

Hey mad,

we now had a longer session trying to find the problem. We went through our scripting logic, tried different changes, but it all is solid and works perfectly, switching languages, building the menu, all good.
But on the two pages with more text, it breaks and shows the content from another page.
When we remove most of the text, it works again.
So to me it looks as if the actual page content is the problem, not our template or script, otherwise the problem should always show up, right?

Our text is written and formatted in HTML, since we took it from our existing pages. Therefore, I removed the pipe and "markdown" command from your examples like this: "@{ :inhalt }" - is that correct?

So the question is: you seem to use mostly markdown and I don't know how much you tried Automad with HTML formatted text. Could you imagine that this is the problem?
I'll probably try to convert one of the shorter texts to markdown to see if that could be the case.
I can provide our text/templates etc. if you want to have a look.

Cheers and thanks a lot for any pointers. Other than this problem, everything works great.

It's interesting to see that in GetSimpleCMS we needed 5 different plugins to do what Automad does without any plugins, even though Automad feels almost "simpler" than GetSimpleCMS in a way.
Great design here :thumbup:

Tom

mad

ThomasHelzle

It would be great to see your template. Just post it here. HTML markup is fine and therefore you can skip markdown.

ThomasHelzle

Hey mad,

currently fighting with markdown to test if it makes a difference. Never really used it before...

Here's our main template (currently with markdown enabled for the test):
http://screendream.de/stuff/Automad/mainPage.zip

The language.php looks like this:

<?php defined('AUTOMAD') or die('Direct access not permitted!'); ?>

<@ if @{ %lang } = "de" @>
    <@ set {
        ":title": @{ titleDeutsch },
        ":menu": @{ menuDeutsch },
        ":keywords": @{ keywordsDeutsch },
        ":description": @{ descriptionDeutsch},
        ":inhalt": @{ textDeutsch },
        ":gallery": @{ imagesDeutsch }
     } @>
<@ else @>
    <@ set {
        ":title": @{ titleEnglish },
        ":menu": @{ menuEnglish },
        ":keywords": @{ keywordsEnglish },
        ":description": @{ descriptionEnglish},
        ":inhalt": @{ textEnglish },
        ":gallery": @{ imagesEnglish }
    } @>
<@ end @>

If you see anything untoward, I'd be curious to hear about it :-)

Thanks and Cheers,

Tom

mad

ThomasHelzle

Looks all fine. And I am sure the length is not the problem. I can imagine, that somethings breaks the option parsing. Do you have special characters in your HTML content? Can you provide an example of the content or even all of it?

ThomasHelzle

I don't think there is anything unusual in the content.

Here is a link to the offending Automad textfile of the homepage:
http://screendream.de/stuff/Automad/mainPageText.zip

This is the same text as on this page:
https://www.screendream.de/

The privacy text is even longer:
https://www.screendream.de/index/privacy/

I couldn't get the markdown to work so far, so it would be great to have HTML working without us having to convert everything...

Thanks a lot for your support!

Cheers,

Tom

mad

ThomasHelzle

You're welcome! I think I identified the issue. There is a performance problem with the option parser in PHP 7. That means you are right. When using your text in a template it all works but when using it as a value for set it fails. Apparently things are getting to complex when using such a long text as a JSON value. I will try to release a fix for it this week.

So stay tuned!
?

ThomasHelzle

Fantastic!
Yes, that was exactly how it "felt" to me too, I just don't know enough about PHP to debug this properly.

I also thought about maybe detaching the text from the menu calculations, since the menu is the thing that has to iterate, while the text would only have to be loaded once depending on the language. Maybe this could be a fallback or am I thinking wrong here?

ATM we're using PHP 7.2.10 on the local "WAMP" server.
The live server (Strato.de) will be running 7.2 or 7.3 with 7.2 being the recommended version there.

Awesome, thank you so much.
We were a bit worried there.... ;-)

Cheers,

Tom

ThomasHelzle

I went through our templates today with a fine comb - they had acquired quite some rust over the years, stuff we didn't use anymore as well as outdated script libraries I had to fix manually since they didn't work with the current jquery.
In the proceedings I tried out what I mentioned above:
I removed the long texts and the image code for the galleria plugin from the language.php file - since they are not relevant for the menu - and instead put this code into the page:
<@ if @{ %lang } = 'de' @> @{ textDeutsch } <@ else @> @{ textEnglish } <@ end @>
This solves all the problems we had, since we no longer write the long texts into :variables.
So this could be the fallback if you don't find another, more elegant solution.

Cheers,

Tom

P.S. I don't seem to be able to use the "code" formatting reliably in this forum - anything specific I need to know?

mad

Great! However, a fix for this will be out soon! ?

ThomasHelzle

Since my fix worked so well, I already went live:

https://www.screendream.de/

Thanks a ton for your support, I'm finally on PHP 7.2 now and also updated the rest of my libraries and tools on the way.

One question though: Automad seems to insert a lot of empty space whenever I use one of it's functions (check the source of the homepage and look at the menu for instance). What's the thinking behind this? I'd normally prefer a much more tight result?

Cheers,

Tom

mad

Like with PHP it depends how you write templates and snippets. Whitespace isn’t added. The whitespace you write is just multiplied in loops. The included themes are all optimized for readability of the template language and therefore also have a lot of whitespace. Note that the produced whitespace is not relevant for the DOM.

ThomasHelzle

Hm - that's weird. It seems to be related to the "language.php" snippet I posted above, which in my view shouldn't produce any newlines since it does only set the :variables and has no actual output.
I'll have to see if minifying it helps, but to me it looks as if the Automad commands somehow create the newlines, even if they don't have any actual html output on a page.
The DOM may not care, but I do - debugging and seeing the indentation and structure is much harder with 6 lines of empty space between each line of actual HTML...

I'm also fighting with the .css Automad inserts when one is logged in. I lost hours finding that out, since it simply didn't occur to me, that Automad would overwrite major tags like h2 with it's own stuff. I thought I had cache problems since that was the case before and only too late realised I'm fighting the CMS itself.
I find that a very strange decision actually, since IMO Automad should work in it's own namespace completely. Right now I have to use two browsers, one where I'm logged in for the actual work and one where I'm logged out to see my own CSS results...?

How is this supposed to work?

Cheers,

Tom

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