I18n string translation and frontmatter

#1

Hi,

I’m still learning to properly use I18n (and Middleman), so please have understanding. I’m using frontmatter in a mypage.html.erb to send page-title to the layout.erb, using title: My Page Title in page’s frontmatter and <title><%= current_page.data.title %></title> in my layout code. This is a correct way, right?

Now, I’m using I18n to localize my page to several languages. If I use the entire-template-localizing approach this is fine, since each page.en.erb / page.de.erb / … contains its own localized frontmatter. But if I don’t want to use entire-template-localizing approach and use en.yml / de.yml instead, then how do I deliver page-title to the layout? Is there a way to use t(:symbol) in frontmatter?

The question is more general, because I use frontmatter not only for the title tag but also to set description metadata, menu title for navigation (sometimes must be shorter than the full page title), etc.

#2

Hello again. No answer? :smile: My problem seems to be very general so did I get something wrong or is there some ommision in Middleman design? I’m betting this is my misunderstanding of how to use it.
Thanks in advance!

#3

OK, so the workaround for this is the following:

\locales\de.yml contains:

page1_title: "Seite 1 Titel"
page2_title: "Seite 2 Titel"
…
page1_descr: "Beschreibung der Seite 1"
page2_descr: "Beschreibung der Seite 2"
…

Then the page1.html.erb begins with:

---
(frontmatter items, if any)
---
<% content_for :head_assets do %>
   <%= content_tag :title, t(:page1_title) %>
   <%= tag :meta, :name => 'description', :content => t(:page1_descr) %>
<% end %>

Layout file layout.erb contains:

<html>
   <head>
   <%= yield_content :head_assets %>
  …

To make it more DRY the content_for blok should be extracted from page1/page2/… to a helper, like this (\helpers\custom_helpers.rb):

module CustomHelpers
  def header_assets(title, descr)
    s1 = content_tag :title, t(title)
    s2 = tag :meta, :name => 'description', :content => t(descr)
    return [s1, s2].join("\n")
  end
end

This helper looks ugly because it contains too much presentation layer (HTML through tag helpers), that’s why I call it a workaround, not a solution. But it works, I’ve tested it on a new, empty project (middleman 3.3.2).

Page code looks less ugly after DRYing:

<% content_for :head_assets do %>
   <%= header_assets(:page1_title, :page1_descr) %>
<% end %>
Using instance variables to populate frontmatter when generating articles?
#4

I know it is a bit late…but anyway

I wrote this helper (Middleman v4):

def draw_page_title
['site.title', ("layout.#{current_resource.data.title}" if current_resource.data.title)].reject(&:blank?).map{ |element| I18n.t(element) }.join(': ') 
end

with locales/en.yml:

---
en:
   site: "My site"
   layout:
      index: Home
      about: About
      work: Work
      contact: Contact

and layout.erb:

<title><%= draw_page_title %></title>

I hope this helps someone.