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Thread tagged as: Api, Runway

Feature enquiry (REST API & Localisation)

hi Drew / Rachel,

We have a project which currently uses Drupal 8 back-end and a JavaScript front-end (Ionic). It runs a website and mobile app for our client.

The content is pretty simple, a collection of text, images and tags / categories.

To date this has all been UK English. However we need to start supporting languages. We know how to achieve this on the front-end but we've hit some surprising bugs in Drupal (the REST API basically doesn't support translated content).

So I'm reviewing potential CMS replacements. I believe Perch Runway offers a REST API. Do you also offer multilingual support for content? Initially we want to translate content into Spanish, but other languages will be required in the future.

thanks, Simon

Simon Jones

Simon Jones 0 points

  • 3 years ago
Drew McLellan

Drew McLellan 2638 points
Perch Support

Hi Simon. We've got a couple of different strategies outlined for doing multilingual sites here: https://docs.grabaperch.com/perch/building/how-do-i-create-a-multilingual-site/

Of course the flexibility of how you can structure things really enables you to build whatever structure you want.

Do you have a sense of how the localisation process needs to work?

hi Drew, thanks for the reply.

The content for this site is really one content type with a few hundred entries. From a CMS point of view it's not very complex. In an ideal world we need to manage translations of the same content rather than keep separate sets of content for different languages. Because it's only one content type there isn't a need for any different site structures for each language site. We also have one taxonomy (tags) which the content of which would need to be translated. But the tags would be the same for each language version.

From the two models on that docs page the second one sounds more usable, though if we duplicate fields I can see that getting out of hand quickly if we have, say, 6 or 7 languages supported. Though it's also very simple in some ways for the content editor!

It may be this isn't the best fit for Perch / Perch Runway, but thanks for explaining what is possible.