Tags hugo

In this post I describe a way to make a single-language hugo site, dual- (or multi-)language. There are many approaches to this, and which approach is best, depends on kind of multi-language site you want. So before you just implement these steps, please read below what you’re going to get, and then decide if this is (or is not) the best way forward. I mostly wrote this down since it’s my second time doing it, and someone (including future-me) might find these comments helpful.

A recurring event In the Hacker Space Trójmiasto, which I a visit when I’m in town, there are regular events. We were looking for a way to put these events on the (Hugo) website. This is easy enough for simple events that happen occasionally (just hard-code the dates), but we had some extra requirements (two for the end-user, and two technical requirements):

An easy way to define recurring meetings (like the monthly picnic, or the bi-weekly board-meeting). Ideally the members could download the event-data in iCalendar (.ics) format. Of course you don’t want to involve a programmer every time that an event gets changed (e.g. an organiser may want to cancel an event last-minute), so whatever format we use, needs to be readable (and editable) by humans :) Ideally everything will work “in-Hugo”, so without an extra pre-compiler step, or something else. Just to make clear what I’m talking about here. There is a section “events”, which contains pages (in Hugo terms). A page is for a named “event-type” (like “picnic”), not a single event (like “picnic on 5 December 2022”). So a single page is for multiple dates. On this page we want to show all the dates for the event, and allow someone to download these dates as an iCalendar (.ics) file. To give you an idea of the structure, visit the events-list here. Note that, depending on when you’re reading this, the system as described in this post may not be live yet.