Hello there. We (small team of website makers) are trying to build our own kirby kit that works as a base for any website.
Since some websites are multilang and some are single lang, we were wondering which would be easier, to have a multilang setup (say es/en) that we could turn single lang, or the other way around.
Since we already had some unexpected multilang behaviours in the past, I thought on top of running some tests I’d ask here about it, just in case there are some of those pesky unknown unknowns.
If you really want to have one kit only, I’d go with the multi-lang version, this will always work, even for a single language. To turn a single language version into a multi-lang version, you have to:
rename all content files
create language variables
modify your templates to work with language variables
create a language switcher
maybe add some more stuff like filtering based on language
As in… declaring one language in config, keeping the language prefix in txt files, no language selection in the panel, but still being able to add another later ?
What will happen if on top of this single-lang-multi-lang site I add a second language to the config? Would I need to rename all content files as when switching from plain single lang (no lang in config) to multi lang, as you suggest?
I’m not quite sure. Let’s say you created a multi-lang site with a single language English, but your multi-lang site had only French and Spanish, I suppose you would probably have to rename those files. I’d choose a language that I was likely to always use.