I18N Subsites: A Plugin for Pelican

Pelican plugin that creates internationalized sub-sites for the default site

Installation

This plugin can be installed via:

python -m pip install pelican-i18n-subsites

As long as you have not explicitly added a PLUGINS setting to your Pelican settings file, then the newly-installed plugin should be automatically detected and enabled. Otherwise, you must add i18n_subsites to your existing PLUGINS list. For more information, please see the How to Use Plugins documentation.

Usage

This plugin extends the translations functionality by creating internationalized sub-sites for the default site.

This plugin is designed for Pelican 3.5 and later.

What it does

1. When the content of the main site is being generated, the settings are saved and the generation stops when content is ready to be written. While reading source files and generating content objects, the output queue is modified in certain ways:

   • translations that will appear as native in a different (sub-)site will be removed
   • untranslated articles will be transformed to drafts if I18N_UNTRANSLATED_ARTICLES is 'hide' (default), removed if 'remove' or kept as they are if 'keep'.
   • untranslated pages will be transformed into hidden pages if I18N_UNTRANSLATED_PAGES is 'hide' (default), removed if 'remove' or kept as they are if 'keep'.
   • additional content manipulation similar to articles and pages can be specified for custom generators in the I18N_GENERATOR_INFO setting.

2. For each language specified in the I18N_SUBSITES dictionary the settings overrides are applied to the settings from the main site and a new sub-site is generated in the same way as with the main site until content is ready to be written.

3. When all (sub-)sites are waiting for content writing, all removed contents, translations and static files are interlinked across the (sub-)sites.

4. Finally, all the output is written.

Setting it up

For each extra used language code, a language-specific settings overrides dictionary must be given (but can be empty) in the I18N_SUBSITES dictionary:

# mapping: language_code -> settings_overrides_dict
I18N_SUBSITES = {
    'cz': {
    'SITENAME': 'Hezkej blog',
    }
}

You must also have the following in your Pelican configuration:

JINJA_ENVIRONMENT = {
'extensions': ['jinja2.ext.i18n'],
}

Default and special overrides

The settings overrides may contain arbitrary settings, however, there are some that are handled in a special way:

SITEURL

: Any overrides to this setting should ensure that there is some level of hierarchy between all (sub-)sites, because Pelican makes all URLs relative to SITEURL and the plugin can only cross-link between the sites using this hierarchy. For instance, with the main site http://example.com a sub-site http://example.com/de will work, but http://de.example.com will not. If not overridden, the language code (the language identifier used in the lang metadata) is appended to the main SITEURL for each sub-site.

OUTPUT_PATH, CACHE_PATH

: If not overridden, the language code is appended as with SITEURL. Separate cache paths are required as parser results depend on the locale.

STATIC_PATHS, THEME_STATIC_PATHS

: If not overridden, they are set to [] and all links to static files are cross-linked to the main site.

THEME, THEME_STATIC_DIR

: If overridden, the logic with THEME_STATIC_PATHS does not apply.

DEFAULT_LANG

: This should not be overridden as the plugin changes it to the language code of each sub-site to change what is perceived as translations.

Localizing templates

Most importantly, this plugin can use localized templates for each sub-site. There are two approaches to having the templates localized:

• You can set a different THEME override for each language in I18N_SUBSITES, e.g. by making a copy of a theme my_theme to my_theme_lang and then editing the templates in the new localized theme. This approach means you don't have to deal with gettext *.po files, but it is harder to maintain over time.
• You use only one theme and localize the templates using the jinja2.ext.i18n Jinja2 extension. For a kickstart read this guide.

Additional context variables

It may be convenient to add language buttons to your theme in addition to the translation links of articles and pages. These buttons could, for example, point to the SITEURL of each (sub-)site. For this reason the plugin adds these variables to the template context:

main_lang

: The language of the main site --- the original DEFAULT_LANG

main_siteurl

: The SITEURL of the main site --- the original SITEURL

lang_siteurls

: An ordered dictionary, mapping all used languages to their SITEURL. The main_lang is the first key with main_siteurl as the value. This dictionary is useful for implementing global language buttons that show the language of the currently viewed (sub-)site too.

extra_siteurls

: An ordered dictionary, subset of lang_siteurls, the current DEFAULT_LANG of the rendered (sub-)site is not included, so for each (sub-)site set(extra_siteurls) == set(lang_siteurls) - set([DEFAULT_LANG]). This dictionary is useful for implementing global language buttons that do not show the current language.

relpath_to_site

: A function that returns a relative path from the first (sub-)site to the second (sub-)site where the (sub-)sites are identified by the language codes given as two arguments.

If you don't like the default ordering of the ordered dictionaries, use a Jinja2 filter to alter the ordering.

All the siteurls above are always absolute even in the case of RELATIVE_URLS == True (it would be to complicated to replicate the Pelican internals for local siteurls), so you may rather use something like {{ SITEURL }}/{{ relpath_to_site(DEFAULT_LANG, main_lang }} to link to the main site.

This short howto shows two example implementations of language buttons.

Usage notes

• It is mandatory to specify lang metadata for each article and page as DEFAULT_LANG is later changed for each sub-site, so content without lang metadata would be rendered in every (sub-)site.
• As with the original translations functionality, slug metadata is used to group translations. It is therefore often convenient to compensate for this by overriding the content URL (which defaults to slug) using the url and save_as metadata. You could also give articles e.g. name metadata and use it in ARTICLE_URL = '{name}.html'.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome and much appreciated. Every little bit helps. You can contribute by improving the documentation, adding missing features, and fixing bugs. You can also help out by reviewing and commenting on existing issues.

To start contributing to this plugin, review the Contributing to Pelican documentation, beginning with the Contributing Code section.

License

This project is licensed under the AGPL-3.0 license.