This month we explored the use of excel files to handle content management and translations. The homepage layout has been updated and is now accessible.
Content Management
We no longer rely on Wordpress to publish or modify new content. The use of an online database always available was not appropriate. Gatsby will fetch data at build time only to generate the final website. It is a manual operation, which may occur weekly or monthly. Our Wordpress was always available.
Moreover, we used Wordpress to publish and translate plain text. A complete CMS was a bit overkill for our purposes. We switched to spreadsheets and text files, hosted on dropbox for collaborative work and version history.
Every time we want to build an updated version of the website, we download the files from dropbox to the build folder and execute scripts to transform these files to data for our website, then Gatsby build it.
We have decided not to have continuous integration nor automatic update for the platform. There will be a delay when the content is available on the dropbox and its publication, up to a couple of days. This way, we will avoid having a server listening to updates and starting a full website build for a minor modification.
Internationalization
internationalization of a website is a great part of the user experience. It's part of our objectives to have a localized website for our visitors. The platform is available in 5 languages (English, French, Italian, Bulgarian, Spanish) and is translated by the partners of the project. To handle translations, the former workflow was:
- Publish the original content in English with Wordpress.
- Updating an excel file on dropbox with English terms and sentences.
- Translation phase with partners, updating their column in the excel file.
- Copy paste the translated content into the translation module of Wordpress.
- Checking typos and publishing.
It was long and involved many steps prone to error, especially wity copy-pasting. To simplify our translations, we started from the tools used and known (dropbox and spreadsheets) to reduce the number of steps.
The translation workflow is now:
- Updating an excel file on dropbox with English terms and sentences.
- Translation phase with partners, updating their column in the excel file.
- Excel cells are converted to text with an automatic script, preventing human errors.
If a partner wants to correct a typo or a translation, its modification in the excel file is the only steps required. Next time we build the website, Gatsby will automatically fetch the updated data.
Accessibility
The homepage is now online and is accessible. We made some choices in the layout and in the navigation features to reach this goal.
We comply with WCAG (Web Content Accessibility Guidelines) 2.0 to build our page as well as RGAA (Guidelines for Accessibility for the French Administration). We also aim to have an enjoyable user experience, that's why we focus on internationalization, mobile browsing and lightweight pages as well. We are using colored sections to emphasize the website structure and organize information on the page.
Many elements must have extra context information to have an accessible webpages: these data must be accessible in the visitor's language. We have integrated the translation of accessibility elements in our translation workflow as well.
Future steps
We are still working on the layout for other pages and we will update the homepage with new sections. We will need to reevaluate the weight budget of the website with this additions.
We plan to use flatfiles for other outputs of the project, such as news and e-learning lessons. Once the design phase for the platform integration for these outputs is done, we would need some templates to organize their delivery.