Setting up a Proper Multilingual Site with GitHub Pages and Jekyll
Jekyll and GitHub Pages are a match made in heaven. The idea of a “flat-file CMS” whose content is compiled into static files that are pushed to a repository and then served as a public website is simply beautiful. Not just that, but it fixes everything that is wrong with normal content management systems. Versioning comes out of the box. There is no need to worry about PHP vulnerabilities, SQL injections etc. because - uh - we’re just serving static files here. If you have ever had to maintain a Wordpress installation you know the pain. Performance is a blast because - uh - we’re just serving static files ;-). In fact, when you host your static site (with a correctly configured domain record) on GitHub Pages everything is backed by their super fast CDN by default!
Jekyll has a very flexible design that allows a great freedom of choice, allowing the user to simply introduce features that are not integrated into its engine. This is particularly the case when one wants to create a multilingual website: while CMS remain very rigid and often require plugins, few filters are sufficient to achieve it with Jekyll. This article aims to present a way to create a multilingual site with Jekyll.
Creating a Multilingual Blog With Jekyll | Forestry.io
Reaching an international audience means having international content. Having your content available in multiple languages is great for maximizing your potential audience. On top of that, ensuring your multilingual site’s content is easy to edit is especially important, to enable translators without development experience to work effectively and reduce the incidence of translation errors. In this post, I will explore how to set up a Jekyll site to support multiple languages, and use Forestry to provide an interface for creating translations.