HippoCMS translated documents with shared fields

Question

I am evaluating HippoCMS and am trying to model a schema of Venues. I want to model a document that has non-translatable features such as telephoneNumber and emailAddress, plus translatable features such as description.

How do I model this in HippoCMS? How do I ensure that the non-translated fields are shared between the different translations, to avoid each translated document having its own copy of a value. Obviously no matter which language you are reading a site in, the telephoneNumber shouldn't change.

The only way I have found for the moment is to create a document called Venue and another document called VenueTranslation. Venue would contain the telephoneNumber and VenueTranslation would contain its description and a link back to the Venue document. There would then be VenueTranslation documents for each language.

Is this the correct approach?

Answer 1

That could work, but you will run into usability issues. I'd say it depends on how many venues you plan to enter into the system, how many languages you are targeting, and, in the end, how keen are your CMS users to pick the right Venue document for every VenueTranslation corresponding to a language. I can see how this will quickly become error prone and cumbersome, but I don't have the numbers.

Regarding the final question, it's not correct nor incorrect: it's just that since the granularity of the translations in Hippo is at the document level and not at the field level, you have to do it this way. Your model makes sense but is not well supported in the CMS. This use case is trivial in a CMS that supports the notion of translatable field.