Best practice running over all posts by category - ignoring the language

[nbartels]

So I have a jekyll project with posts in English and the same in German, German is the default language. This is working fine, I got the language switcher running and everything, but there is one blind spot - the post search.

I use lunr.js to build a index and search posts.

The problem is, I have a data json file, that is build with jekyll and there I iterate over the posts and convert them in a custom JSON structure I need for the search. Because not all posts categories are searchable, I use {% for post in site.categories.mycat1 %} as loop. The problem is, that only the default language is used and so I only get the German posts in my search index.

Is there a way to access all posts with site.categories.X independent of the language? or can I at least define the language, so I run over the posts in English and then over the German posts?

Maybe some complete other approach is needed?

Would be great to get some input ...

[george-gca]

I had the same issue in my template. My solution was to create a json structure for every language inside a js, and only load the js for that language when needed (for my case I needed a whole js). What I did was:

1. Created _scripts/search.liquid.js where I loop through all posts on the specific language. For this, I added this to its front matter:

---
permalink: /assets/js/search-data.js
---

2. Add this directory to be included in _config.yml
3. When loading the scripts for the page, I get the correct scripts from its path:

<script
  src="{% if site.active_lang != site.default_lang %}{{ '/assets/js/search-data.js' | prepend: site.active_lang | relative_url }}{% else %}{{ '/assets/js/search-data.js' | relative_url }}{% endif %}"
></script>

Also note that, in my case, my default language don't use any extra path (e.g., en-us), that's why I do this if ... else above.