Reviving Praderas (Day 8) — Phase 5: ES/EN content model, translation pairs, and hreflang

Published on 04/28/26 12:00:00
Desarrollo Web Productividad Inteligencia Artificial

Reviving Praderas (Day 8) — Phase 5: bilingual without rewriting history

After Phase 4 (SEO), the next agreed bucket was Phase 5: multilingual. The hard constraint was to avoid mass-changing existing Spanish URLs under /blog/.... The approach keeps Spanish posts where they are and adds English along predictable paths.

What we shipped

  1. Content layout

    • Spanish posts: content/blog/*.md → /blog/slug (unchanged).
    • English posts: content/blog/en/*.md → /blog/en/slug.
    • English top-level pages: content/en/*.md → /en/slug (for now: Home and /en/blog listing).

  2. Pairing translations

    • Optional Lang: es | en (language can also be inferred from the path).
    • Translation_Key: same string on both files so the site can wire alternates.
      Spanish and English home pages share praderas-home so the header switcher appears on both.

  3. plugins/65-Multilingual.php

    • Registers metadata, indexes pairs, exposes Twig variables for language, alternates, home URL, and hreflang links (including x-default to Spanish when both exist).

  4. Theme + social metadata

    • Dynamic og:locale / og:locale:alternate, hreflang loop in page-meta.twig, html lang, navbar brand to the correct home, and a small lang-switcher.twig when a paired page exists.

  5. Plugins aligned with language

    • Pagination for /blog excludes blog/en/*; English listing uses blog-en.twig.
    • Prev/next and related posts stay in the same language as the current post; category counts on the Spanish categories page use Spanish posts only.
    • Series maps are per language; /series remains Spanish-first.
    • /archivo lists Spanish posts only.
    • Search stopwords: low_value_words_en in config/config.yml when the current page is English.

  6. Sidebar

    • English labels and “Recent posts” limited to blog/en/* when content_lang == 'en'.

Honest scope limits

  • We are not translating the full archive yet—only this paired Day 8 post plus the English home/blog stubs.
  • Sitemap split and Phase 6 JSON remain future work.
  • The EN nav still links About to the existing Spanish acerca-de-picocms page until a dedicated English page is added.

Closing

Phase 5 gives a maintainable skeleton: URLs, metadata, hreflang, and minimal UI. The remaining work is mostly editorial—adding Translation_Key pairs as translations exist.