Paginate a Dual Language Blog in Jekyll

I’ve been looking for a dual language solution that will paginate both blogs and have finally got something working. Most of the solutions I found wouldn’t paginate the secondary language blog since Jekyll will only paginate one blog by default.

TL;DR

I’m paginating the secondary language blog with Georg Schmidl’s Jekyll Paginate Multiple plugin. I’ve setup an example repo here.

What Did Not Work

Here are a few of the plugins I’ve tried that did not work for me:

Plugins:

I also tried the Octopress Paginate plugin which is supposed to allow multilingual pagination. I couldn’t get that to work either. It would throw errors or simply wouldn’t build.

There are a few tutorials around the interwebz that attempt to get multi-language blogs to work on GitHub Pages—meaning without plugins. The two below came close but neither would paginate the secondary language blog.

Tutorials:

What Did Work

I didn’t need this to work on GitHub pages so being a plugin wasn’t a problem, but I did need it to work on CloudCannon. After contacting CloudCannon for ideas, Ross setup a repo for me and sent me an email explaining the structure. I didn’t like the exact structure he’d used, but it got me thinking. He didn’t use plugins and was able to do everything I wanted except the pagination.

So here’s what I’ve got working so far:

  1. Create a directory for the secondary language. In the example repo, I’ve used /th.
  2. Add all the translated documents there—the secondary index.html, about.html, etc.
  3. Be sure to add include: [th] to your _config.yml file so Jekyll knows where those files live.

Pagination Settings

In order to paginate the secondary language blog, I’m using the jekyll-paginate-multiple plugin. The plugin’s README file does a good job of explaining the setup. My paginate settings in the _config.yml file are slightly different since I’m not outputting the English blog in a /en directory.

paginate_multiple:
  - paginate: 3
    paginate_path: '/blog/page:num/'
    sub_dir: '/en'
  - paginate: 3
    paginate_path: '/th/blog/page:num/'
    sub_dir: '/th'

Language Switcher

Since the secondary language is added as a subdirectory we’ll need to add “/th” before the page URL or remove it if we’re on a Thai language page.

{% if page.language == 'en' %}
  <a class="menu-item" href="{{ page.url | prepend: '/th' }}">ภาษาไทย</a>
{% endif %}
{% if page.language == 'th' %}
  <a class="menu-item" href="{{ page.url | remove: '/th' }}">English</a>
{% endif %}

Dates

In order to have blog post dates in the appropriate language, we’ve got to tell Jekyll what those dates are called. Not only did I want the dates displayed in the correct language, I wanted them ordered differently. Since I was working with Thai language I wanted it to output in day-month-year and in English month-day-year like this:

This code is 100% swiped from Sylvain Durand’s Making Jekyll Multilingual article.

I created a date.html file in the _includes directory with the following:

{% capture hide %}

{% if include.mode != 'month' %}

  {% assign day = include.date | date: "%-d" %}

{% endif %}

{% if page.language == 'th' %}

  {% assign m = include.date | date: "%-m" %}
  {% case m %}
    {% when '1' %}
      {% capture month %}มกราคม{% endcapture %}
    {% when '2' %}
      {% capture month %}กุมภาพันธ์{% endcapture %}
    {% when '3' %}
      {% capture month %}มีนาคม{% endcapture %}
    {% when '4' %}
      {% capture month %}เมษายน{% endcapture %}
    {% when '5' %}
      {% capture month %}พฤษภาคม{% endcapture %}
    {% when '6' %}
      {% capture month %}มิถุนายน{% endcapture %}
    {% when '7' %}
      {% capture month %}กรกฎาคม{% endcapture %}
    {% when '8' %}
      {% capture month %}สิงหาคม{% endcapture %}
    {% when '9' %}
      {% capture month %}กันยายน{% endcapture %}
    {% when '10' %}
      {% capture month %}ตุลาคม{% endcapture %}
    {% when '11' %}
      {% capture month %}พฤศจิกายน{% endcapture %}
    {% when '12' %}
      {% capture month %}ธันวาคม{% endcapture %}
  {% endcase %}

{% else %}

  {% capture month %}{{ include.date | date: "%B" }}{% endcapture %}

{% endif %}

{% capture year %}{{ include.date | date: "%Y" }}{% endcapture %}

{% endcapture %}

I then created two time-files in the _includes directory: page-time.html and post-time.html. I use {% include page-time.html %} when I’m calling from within a page or a post since I need to call page.date. And I use {% include post-time.html %} when I’m calling inside a loop where I’ve used {% for post in paginator.posts %} and need to call post.date.

Be sure to call the date file ({% include date.html date=page.date %}) in your page and post time-files.

TODO

I’m still looking for a way to paginate categories. If you know of a way or find some documentation or a tutorial that might lead somewhere, please get in touch.