If you’re reading this blog, you have noticed I’ve started posting more content in French. Something that came as a complete surprise for me, but something I won’t try to resist either. It almost feels like if I was falling in love again with my native language again and I won’t deny it.
For now, I’ve been prefacing each French blog post title with a ‘FR:’ tag to make it clearer what to expect. But there must be a better way to have a multilingual blog than manually marking each language, and indeed there is.
Hugo, the engine I’m using to create the website, is supposed to be multilingual. So it should be possible to display English posts to English-focused readers, and French posts to the French ones.
Great! I decided to spend this morning making a test site and see how well it would work and what it would require to change my real blog to something multilingual. I was willing to spend four hours on that. I’m now in the sixth hours and I’m forced to admit I failed and I can’t make it work, at all.
Neither the official documentation or the many guides I’ve read helped, nor watching videos on YouTube. And that’s working on a very minimal test site without any modification and barely any content. I can’t begin to imagine what a pain it would be to try to make it work on my real website.
Why? It’s hard to pin-point an exact reason but, imho, beside me not being smart enough it all boils down to one thing: Hugo lacks what I would call a minimal & working basic configuration.
I mean, no tools are perfect and most of them also need some time learning them. I’m fine with that. Where I think it becomes an issue with Hugo is that it starts having issues at the very early stage of its installation process which is both extremely simple and… incomplete.
Out of the box, a fresh install doesn’t come with a theme. The issue is that without a theme, one cannot really start using Hugo. So one needs to install a theme (which is not that difficult) by selecting it from from the gazillion or so available for free and manually install it. Having a lot of choice in themes is great, sure, unless each theme comes with its own features, and its limits, and its issues. So, depending the theme used one cannot be sure what features will be available, with what limitations or even how they should be configured properly. Not even how the content will need to be structured.
Imho, none of that would be an issue if, out of the box, Hugo came with a minimal theme, one that could then be used as starting point for everyone, no matter what. As it is, I’m forced to admit I don’t have the skills required to make it work or even just to understand how I’m supposed to be trying to make it work.
It’s too much time and efforts for something I’m not interested in as the time I spend on the blog, I’d rather spend it writing content than learning how to configure the blog. That’s not Hugo’s fault, but that doesn’t help me much either.
Conclusion?
I tried and failed at making my blog working as a properly structured multilingual blog.
Maybe one day I will stumble upon a doc written by someone smarter than I am, or maybe Hugo will change the way it works in that regard? Meanwhile, the blog will remain the hack it is, with French content marked with a ‘FR:’ before each title. Or maybe, I will mark English instead? No idea.
If that bothers you, be assured it also bothers me a lot too but still a lot less than the perspective of wasting more of my time trying understand how to use a feature that is supposed to be working or even trying to find a documentation that I could follow step by step.
Also, I want to spend the rest of my Sunday reading books, not documentation or how-to guides ;)
Published: 2025/02/23