Reading Dev Docs Switches Site Language To English

[harding]

If I'm reading the German version of the development page, https://bitcoin.org/de/entwicklung, and click the link on that page to the developer docs, https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-documentation, I get the English version of the site.

That means all the menus are in English, and if I click any links to elsewhere on the site, I get the English pages instead of the German pages. Although switching back to German isn't hard, it does seem annoying.

I'm not sure what the solution is for this problem. I guess we could build the dev docs multiple times with each of the language-specific menus, but that would be CPU-intensive and would make previewing harder. Maybe if we did that, we could create an English-only fast-build mode. (I already block api.github.com, api.meetup.com, and maps.googleapis.com in my /etc/hosts to speed up builds and reduce load on those services.)

[saivann]

Agreed, this is annoying. The same happens to any English only page such as https://bitcoin.org/en/alerts, but most of the website is multi-language.

As you rightfully point out, since we're using static pages, we would need to duplicate content to get this working (which might introduce other challenges and more hackish solutions, such as conflicts between autocrossref links and the plugins used for translated templates, sitemap.rb would need to somehow deal with arbitrary canonical content, the performance issues you have suggested, etc).

So thus far I concluded this UI bugfix was probably not worth all these efforts, but if someone thinks they can provide a good fix for this, you''re welcome.

Re: Fast build mode; I may have not tested this very seriously, but I think built time is really affected by all features provided by plugins and disabling them individually improves performance while affecting targeted parts of the website. This means there is no "fast-build" that would work for every use case; since we're always testing different parts of the website. Maybe we could somehow make it easier to disable each and every feature at will, but I'm not sure how we could do this easily (while spending less time developing this than we would otherwise by simply building the full website).

[harding]

Hmm. Do you think it might be worth creating sub-sites for this? They wouldn't have to be actual sub-domains---they could just be special URLs which are rendered separately from the main layout by Jekyll.

For example, at the bottom of this GitHub page is a link to their Status page which uses a different layout from the main site. To get back to the main site from that page, you either click the browser Back button (taking you back to the localized page you were on before) or you click the GitHub logo, which links to their main page (which presumably displays a localized page).

For the dev docs, using a subsite would allow us (in reality, probably mostly you :-) to play around with the formatting a bit more. For example, the regular top menu could maybe be replaced with three menus for each of the docs (guide, ref, examples).

For pages like alerts, having a different format than the main site might make the page look more official. (Not an important feature, but maybe a nice touch.)

In either case, we would make it easy to get back to the main page of the site which has the redirect-by-language code.

Anyway, this is just an off-the-top-of-my head idea. Maybe it'll seem quite silly when I wake up tomorrow. :-)