Comment by johnfernow | Hacker News Reader

Comment by johnfernow | Hacker News Reader

I love static site generators and I really wish more sites were built with them. There are likely millions of websites that have no login functionality or other functionality that specifically requires a back-end, but use a CMS anyway. Usually a CMS is slower for the users on the site, more expensive for the company running it, less secure, less stable, and more maintenance than a statically generated site.

I do think there's still plenty of room for improvement for static site generators though. Does anyone have any recommendations for an SSG with easy support for multi-lingual websites? Ideally, I'd be able to translate the text and provide alternative images, videos, and links without having to change the HTML structure of a given page for each language. Technically, this can be done easily with JavaScript by using a plugin like jQuery Localize [1], but that has two major downsides: (1) all other languages except the default breaks if JavaScript is disabled and (2) users won't know that the site supports their language from search engine results (the snippet will be in the default language.) So it'd be great if I could write the pseudo HTML of a page once, but generate multiple HTML files for each different language (placed into their respective directory, e.g. en/, es/, fr/ etc.)

[1] https://github.com/coderifous/jquery-localize

Hugo has a multilingual mode[1] which I am using on two websites. It's a bit confusing at first but works pretty well for me.

For content, you basically put blogarticle.en.md and blogarticle.fr.md next to each other it will treat it as the same article in different languages. Per default it puts different language websites into different subdirectories (with a default language at root level) but it also supports multi hosts setups where you can define different domains for each language (e.g. blog.de and blog.fr). There's support for generating "this article in other languages" type menus, which allows you to crosslink the website across languages. There's also i18n support for translating stuff in templates etc., where you provide a dictionary file with translated versions of each string, and it'll replace them based on the language of the current article (useful for stuff like navigational menus etc.).

1: https://gohugo.io/content-management/multilingual/

I have used this for Chinese and English bilingual websites and it works very well once you get the hang of it.

My portfolio website is 4-lingual and the initial setup was pretty confusing (a bit trial and error until I understood how it works). But now it works very conveniently.

Check out Kit55 multilingual sites:. https://stack55.com/multilingual-sites/ compared to Hugo it is a walk in the park.

Naive question from a beginner in this space.

Most of the business website providers out there, like Wix, seem to be all-in on CMS systems.

Is there a low-code way to get started?

What do you mean with low code? HTML + CSS only?

Static site generators generally only require tiny amounts of scripts to get going and you just write markdown. You can use pre-made themes so no knowledge of HTML or CSS needed.

Business website providers use CMSes with databases in part because they support full on WYSIWYG editors in the browser, among other things.

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