Context
In January 2022, I decided to turn my old blog into a full-fledged website. But I wanted more than that, I wanted it bilingual., to create more content in the future in my native language, which is French. 🥖
I already had a few articles written in French, but they were mixed with all other English posts... Also, only the article content was in French, because the layout was still in English... It was not a great experience for anyone, right? I decided it was time to look for a suitable solution. 😎
Unfortunately, at the time of this writing, my content management system (CMS) Ghost doesn't natively support multilingual. The Ghost team doesn't plan to support it anytime soon... 😥
They currently have a tutorial to partially support multilingualism, but it translates only the main content. All other features built into a theme, such as menus, header, footer, tags, related articles, are left in the default language... 😑
One solution that some people have implemented is to have multiple Ghost instances, one per language. It works, but there are some limitations, such as duplication on accesses, files, separate URLs...
That's not really great for our users, is it? 😣
So, I challenge myself to see if it was possible to make a fully bilingual website with a single instance of Ghost. 🎯
Spoiler: it turns out it's possible! 🍾
For example, a multilingual theme can render your website in French OR English.
A multilingual website will render your website in French AND English.
The Journey
So stay tuned for updates in the coming weeks!
Benjamin Rancourt
Resources
If you're looking for official Ghost documentation about localization, here are the current articles you can find on their website:
