6.2 – Missing pages

en/notes/coffee exists, de/notes/coffee does not. A link to it — from an email, a bookmark, another site — leads nowhere.

options:
  fallbackPages: redirect

With that the plugin writes de/notes/coffee.html with a redirect to the English version. The address works, and the visitor arrives at the content. The file is named after the slug plus .html — not a directory with an index.html inside it; look for it in the built folder under the other name and you look in the wrong place.

The generated pages carry noindex — they are not meant to appear in search results themselves, only to keep addresses alive.

Folder and suffix conventions only

Both procedures rest on computing the other language’s slug from one: en/notes/coffee → de/notes/coffee. For a page whose language sits only in the frontmatter that computation does not exist — no redirect is created for it (2.1).

Folder pages are exempt

No redirect is written for a folder’s index page. The reason is concrete: Quartz creates a page for every folder listing its contents, and a redirect in the same place would overwrite it. A useful listing would turn into a jump into the other language.

When this is not the right answer

Redirects are good for addresses that once existed or that somebody might guess. For a site that is deliberately only partly translated they are a quiet way of hiding the state: every click lands in the other language, and nobody sees how much is missing.

The more honest combination there is switcher.missing: disabled — the entry is there, greyed out, telling the truth.