Understanding of creating multilingual pages

Kirby 3 Questions 🤔
1

I don’t know if this a bug or probably my setup is wrong and it still needs some parameters to configure.

My setup:

  • I have a multilingual project configured with (en) and (de) as languages
  • (en) is default language
  • I use template default for this test
  • Kirby version 3.4.4

Creating a page in default language
I create a new page called Test in default language (en). Kirby creates a file default.en.txt
Now I fill the page with content. Fields, builder, etc. a lot of content … and save it. The file default.en.txt is updated. Everything works as expected.

Now I switch to the (de) version of this page:

The complete content was taken from the (en) version, all fields are already filled with (en) content and page preview works. But: A file called default.de.txt is not yet created and there is also no save button visible in the panel. After changing one field, the save button appears and the file default.de.txt is finally created after saving.

Creating a page NOT in default language
I create a new page called Test in language (de). Kirby creates a file default.en.txt.
Now I fill the page with content. Fields, builder, etc. a lot of content … and save it. Now the file default.de.txt is created with all my content. The (en) version stays empty.

For an editor it is very unclear what Kirby exactly does, at least if you don’t check the file system and if you only work in the panel.

2

That is exactly how it works.

Kirby always creates a text file for the default language.

Kirby prefills the fields of a non-default language with the content of the default language to facilitate translating content.

Depending on your use case, it might make sense to prevent content creation from a non-default language (via a hook, for example).

3

The current behavior causes that all language versions are already present although they are not yet translated. Wouldn’t it be clearer to “copy” the default content via click into another language if needed?

4

Kirby doesn’t save the content of the default-language into the non-default language but only displays the content for translation purposes. It wouldn’t make sense to actually store this untranslated content, I think. Therefore copying this content into another language wouldn’t make sense from my perspective. As I said, the purpose of showing this content is so that editors now what they should translate.

No, only the default content file is always created, the non-default ones are only created once you actually hit the save button.

But please feel free to give your feedback at https://feedback.getkirby.com

5

This is exactly what I mean. It is very confusing for an editor. The editor does not know if a page is already saved or if the content is only displayed for translation purposes. It looks the page is already created (because there is no save button), but actually it is not.

And if you work further on the content of the default language the “feature” is gone, once the non default file is saved. Imho it would be a great benefit to copy again the content from another language.

I’ll write a feedback. Thanks for explanation so far.

6

I think that might end with mess if you copy stuff onto already (partly) translated stuff, but that’s just my opinion, of course.

7

Kirby should of course warn that current content will be overwritten, if you really want to copy the content again.

8

I created a suggestion on your feedback page. Feel free to vote for it :slight_smile: