I’ve encountered some strange behaviour, which i think could be a bug. Here’s how it looks:
i have 3 sites: default - UK, PL, and DE. PL and DE have this option set to /pl and /de:
the problem is with translating fields (for test i’m using Meta Description field from Meta tab but also any custom created fields) - when i’m saving field on ie DE locale and UK and PL has this field not filled, the value of this field is being saved also on locales where it should remain empty. With this, on PL and UK site i have field translated to german. This is not happening when PL and UK has something in this fields already though. So, luckily, it does not overwrites values.
I’ve read some topics here but found no solution. One of them was solved by installing Rainlab Translate plugin, but i’ve already installed this one and issue remains.
I thing you will always need Rainlab Translate plugin to be able to translate content in Rainlab Pages.
As Rainlab Pages uses plain text files, there must exists content in a default language (UK in your setup) - so if you start with DE, plugin will first create file for default language (with DE content as there is no other content at the moment) and than for the other languages.
You can check /content folder in your theme to see what I mean.
My current setup is a little different but works (I think) better with Multisite:
I have 3 languages in Multisite defined (CS, EN, DE), each with locale prefix (/cs, /en, /de).
I have one main theme and 3 child themes:
/mytheme /mytheme-cs /mytheme-en /mytheme-de
Child themes are empty only with theme.yaml that points to main theme.
In Multisite definition I assign this themes for each language (cs → mytheme-cs, en → mytheme-en, de → mytheme-de).
Benefit of this approach is that you don’t have to keep the same pages structure for all languages.
from what i understand, there should always be a default content before creating localized one. That’s quite reasonable, but in my case, i have some fields that are displayed only on localized sites - maybe your suggestion to use separate themes for locales could do the trick.
