YAML front matter

Every page or post, that needs to be translated must either have a language key or a languages array inside its YAML front-matter. Additionally, it may also have an subset key which tells the plugin to traverse further into the language data. This allows for an abridged access of language strings within the page or post.

So if you want to print out home.welcome, you can abbreviate that to welcome if you have the subset key set to home in the YAML front-matter. Also works with dot-notation, e.g. home.welcome.heading becomes welcome.heading. You can also have dot-notation in the subset key by the way.

Example

---
layout: default
languages:
- en
- de
subset: home
---
<h1>{% t 'welcome' %}</h1>
<p>{% t 'message' %}</p>

Upon build, the plugin will create two separate translations into /en and /de subdirectories within the destination directory with an identical filename.

Provided that language_data is set to the default data.lang.%%, the t language tag will print out the strings data.lang.en.welcome and data.lang.en.message as well as data.lang.de.welcome and data.lang.de.message.

For this example, only one language file, lang.yml living in the _data directory is needed:

---
en:
  home:
    welcome: Welcome to my example home page
    message: This is my example home page powered by the Jekyll language plugin.
de:
  home:
    welcome: Willkommen auf meiner Beispielhomepage
    message: Dies ist meine Beispielhomepage getrieben vom Jekyll-Sprachplugin.

URLs and Permalinks

By default, the plugin will create a subdirectory for each language within the destination directory. For the example above, two subdirectories are created, /en and /de. You can override this behavior by using permalinks. Permalinks work normally except the :language placeholder is available additionally.

permalink: /:language/path/to/file.html

Localized URLs

Currently, localized URLs only work with pages since I don't see an inherent need to make it work with posts which have their own slug mechanism.

For every page that has the subset key set in its front-matter, the plugin will make every translation (key-value) within that subset available as a t.-prefixed placeholder. However, there is no support for recursive subsets as there is in the t translation liquid tag.

Example

Add the following line to the YAML front-matter of the page from the above example:

permalink: /:language/:t.slug.html

Then, extend the language file by the following translations:

en:
  home:
    slug: home
de:
  home:
    slug: start