i18n: Add support for file collections

[reimertz]

We are currently on a forked version of the first PR of the internationalization track where we added support for list collections.

But since it was decided to rework above implementation and use another architecture, our solution became obsolete and are now stuck on that fork. 😅

So naturally, we've started looking into contributing by adding support for file collections but would like to ask @erezrokah if there was any other reason for not adding this feature except from scoping the PR?

Something else we should thing about when we add the feature?
Any pointers / ideas / etc before we go deep here would be very helpful.

[erezrokah]

No other reasons other then scoping down the PR and also file collections it would need some discussion on how to configure and implement it since at the moment a file collection points to specific files, so I'm not sure how we need to structure the output.

I would start by describing your use case and we can move forward from there.

[gewfy]

Hi
Thank you for replying! I can fill in here (colleague with @reimertz).

Aside from pure editorial content we also use netlify cms for handling translations of all UI strings in the app. So basically we have a schema UI with one file per category / screen / component of the app. In total it's 74 files with separate schemas for every file. One option would of course be to move them to individual collections, but that would be a quite messy left nav. Another would be to combine them into one or a couple of collections, but then the edit view would be quite massive and the versioning / branching not working as efficiently.

So what we need is basically the way file collections work today - but with i18n support.

I'm working on getting to know netlify-cms to implement this for us and contribute back to the awesome work you're doing with this project. But please let me know if this would be something that you could prioritize or collaborate on.

Thank you!

[iansinnott]

I'm seeing some unexpected behavior and I'm wondering if I'm missing something or if there might be a bug.

It seems that the i18n: duplicate setting does not work in file collections. Here's the relevant portion of my config:

    - name: 'config_2'
      label: 'Config 2'
      i18n:
          structure: single_file
      editor:
          preview: false
      files:
          - label: 'Blarg (en|zh)'
            name: 'navigation_en_zh'
            file: 'data/navigation.yaml'
            i18n: true
            fields:
                - label: 'Navigation Items'
                  name: 'items'
                  widget: 'list'
                  i18n: true
                  fields:
                      - { label: Name, name: name, widget: string, i18n: true }
                      - { label: Topic, name: topic, widget: string, i18n: true }
                      - { label: Link, name: link, widget: string, i18n: duplicate } # <--- This... 

P.S. Thanks for shipping this everyone! Even without duplicate this is a big improvement to the i18n support.

[erezrokah]

Hi @iansinnott, see https://www.netlifycms.org/docs/beta-features/#limitations for list widget limitations and also #4386