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Jekyll: Multilingual

One of the big ups of Jekyll is the luxutry of being able to work with GitHub Pages. Building a multilingual site is a bit harder, though. Using plugins is except for a view exceptions not possible.

My site is bilingual—German and English—whereas German is my main language. To do this I need an adjusted directory structure, categories and front matter defaults.

# Jump to heading Directory structure

For the main language, I use Jekyll as usual. The regular _posts-directory for posts and pages in the project directory. Translations are housed in the corresponding subdirectory (e.g. /en for English).

Because titles can duplicate across languages, we need permalinks which distinct from one another. It’ll work without for titles like “Jekyll: Mehrsprachig” and “Jekyll: Multilingual”, but we get a conflict for “Soundtracks”.

If we take a look at the docs for permalinks, we don’t see too many possibilities. One could use the language slug in the title, but that’s silly and inconvenient.

We use categories. That’s not too sound as well, but it works. Actually, we already created the category en with out directory structure.

# Jump to heading _config.yml:

permalink: /:categories/:year/:month/:title

With the exception of permalink: pretty these settings apply to posts only. Permalinks need to be explicitly set for pages.

# Jump to heading Set the language

To distinct between German and English documents, we don’t need to alienate categories again. We only needed that for the permalinks. For posts and pages we set the language with lang: [de|en].

And with front matter defaults we don’t even need to do this for each document over and over. Nice!

# Jump to heading _config.yml:

defaults:
  # Default language
  -
    scope:
      path: ""
    values:
      lang: "de"
  # Language for everything inside `/en`
  -
    scope:
      path: "en"
    values:
      lang: "en"
  # Language for English posts
  -
    scope:
      path: "en/_posts"
      type: "posts" # As of version 2.3.0, Jekyll uses plural keywords for type
    values:
      lang: "en"

# Jump to heading The blog thing

Creating a paginated blog with Jekyll is super easy. However this has its limitations. For example one isn’t able to filter the posts paginator.posts is returning. That means I can’t just take all posts with lang: en and make a blog with pagination.

Because I

Da ich kompromissfreudig bin, hab ich dieses Vorhaben gestrichen. Stattdessen nehm ich mir jetzt die ersten 10 Beiträge und verlinke dann auf’s Archiv.

# Jump to heading _config.yml:

max_posts: 10

# Jump to heading index.html:


{% assign posts_de = site.posts | where: "lang", "de" %}

{% for post in posts_de limit:site.max_posts %}
<!-- Beiträge 1–10 -->
{% endfor %}

{% if posts_de.size > site.max_posts %}
<!-- Archivlink, bei mehr als 10 Beiträgen -->
{% endif %}

Das war’s im Grunde. Zum besseren Verständnis könnt ihr euch das GitHub Repository meiner Seite ansehen und durch die Dateien klicken.