Variants

A variant is another edition of the same piece of content, in another language. Your article exists in English; you give it a French variant, written and published on its own. Readers get the edition that matches them, search engines are told the editions belong together, and you keep one publication, one list of subscribers and one set of reactions.

A variant is a language: the key is two letters ("fr", "es", "de"). Variants for a country or with a key of your own are not offered yet.

Set up your languages

Open the Editorial tab in Studio, then Variants. Your publication's default is already there, marked "Default": it comes from the language set on your publication, and it is the content you have always published. Click "New variant" to add a language. A window opens in two steps:

• Language. Pick it from the list. The languages your publication already has are left out.
• Name. What readers see on the picker. It is filled in for you in the language's own name ("Français", "Español"), and you can change it. It can't be left blank.
• Readers can pick it on a page. On by default. Switch it off for an edition you want to reach only through its address or a reader's browser language, not through the picker.

Once created, a variant can be renamed and its picker switch changed ("Edit"), but not its language. Each variant in the list also has "Make it the default" (the star) and "Remove". The default can't be removed. Removing a variant stops it being offered for new content and in readers' pickers; the editions already written keep existing.

Write a variant of an article

The editor's top bar has a variants button with a language icon. It shows the key of the edition you are editing (EN, FR) or "Variants". Click it to open the Variants window:

• Each edition of this content, with its status (Published, Draft or Scheduled), its name and "Default" on the default one. The one you are editing is highlighted.
• Click a language to edit it. The pencil does the same.
• The toggle publishes or unpublishes that edition alone. Publishing the French edition doesn't touch the English one.
• The bin removes that edition of this content. The default can't be removed.
• "New variant" lists the languages from your Variants tab that this content doesn't have yet. Click one and it is made from the edition you are editing, then opens for you to change. It starts as a draft: nobody reads it until you publish it.
• "Another language" makes a new language for your publication without leaving the editor (the same window as in Studio), then makes this content's edition in it.

Every change you make while an edition is open goes to that edition: the default is left as it was. Once you have several editions, the publish window says so at its top: where to publish and publishing apply to the edition you are editing only, and the other settings are shared by every edition.

The button is in the editor's top bar of articles, zines, pages, coverages, events, visuals and blurbs. It is not in the post composer, chapters, series, long forms and videos, nor in the editors of book clubs, publications, referrals, rubrics and topics.

What an edition has of its own

• Name (title), caption and slug.
• Text.
• Appearance, see Article appearance.
• Its publishing: draft, scheduled or published, and its dates.
• The cover, when you set one. An edition without a cover of its own uses the default's.
• Its own version history: undo and redo walk the versions of the edition you are editing only.

What stays shared

Rubric and series, with their numbering, reactions, comments and pins are those of the content, not of an edition. A comment left on the French edition is on the same article.

What readers see

Which edition a reader gets, in this order:

• The address they came by. ?variant=fr names an edition. A /fr/ address asks for French.
• The edition they picked in the page's switcher, remembered in their browser (a cookie) for next time.
• Their browser's languages, best first.

A reader gets the first of those that you have published. If none has been, they get the default edition. Nobody sees a draft.

A language is matched with the edition set to that language, and a region is set aside when needed: a browser asking for fr-CA gets the fr edition.

Each edition has its own address, built from its own slug. For French it sits under /fr/; for another language it is the same page with ?variant=<key> added.

The language switcher

On an article or a zine page, readers see a row of buttons under the caption, one per edition, with the current one marked. It only appears when there are at least two editions to choose from, and it lists the published editions whose "Readers can pick it on a page" switch is on. Names are shown as you wrote them in the Variants tab, in the reader's language when you gave one. A reader's choice is kept: their next pages open in that edition when it exists.

Search engines

Each edition of an article has its own address, and each published edition is announced to search engines as an alternate of the others (hreflang).

What variants don't do yet

• Emails. A newsletter goes out with the default edition only. Publishing another language doesn't send it by email, and subscribers don't get the edition that matches them.
• Search engines beyond articles. The alternates described above are for articles. Zines, pages and posts don't announce them, and there is no sitemap per edition.
• Search on your site is not per edition.
• Translation. Peakub doesn't translate for you: a new edition is a copy of the one it was made from, for you to rewrite.
• Countries and keys of your own. Only languages for now.