Umbraco Headless - MultiLingual with Vorto

You want to fully embrace the advantages offered by Vorto inside your Umbraco solution. Unfortunately, the current Umbraco Headless béta does not include it out of the box (yet!).
Let's install it ourselves.

Vor-who?

New to Umbraco or living under a rock? Vorto is a nice, little module, that transforms your text-properties into multi-lingual text properties.

Yes, Umbraco 8 will make it obsolete as it will have a built-in mechaniscm for multi-language. Since we're not there yet, let's just carry on.

If your past solution to multi-language was to create TWO properties for each and every text-field (one English, one Spanish, for example), it's not only annoying to maintain and keep track, but it's a nightmare when the customer suddenly decides to add a 3rd language, and a 4th ...

To take advantage of Vorto, all you have to do is :

• Install it. (see below)
• Add one or more datatypes in the Developer-section (e.g. one for Textstring, one for Richtext editor).
  
• Define properties in your document types with this datatype.

When used on a normal TextString it looks like below. Easy tabs to switch language. Checkmarks indicate which languages have a value.

It automatically grabs all defined languages, but you can override this behaviour, set the default language ...  Just go read about it here.

Normal Installation

For on-premise Umbraco or Umbraco Cloud, you could install this as a nuget-package. If you do not have any custom code, you can download the package and install it in the Umbraco backend.

Install-Package Our.Umbraco.Vorto

The installation contains plugin-files and a dll, so no database-changes.

• App_Plugins/Vorto/css/vorto.css
• App_Plugins/Vorto/js/jquery.hoverIntent.minified.js
• App_Plugins/Vorto/js/vorto.js
• App_Plugins/Vorto/views/vorto.html
• App_Plugins/Vorto/views/vorto.languagePicker.html
• App_Plugins/Vorto/views/vorto.languageSourceRadioList.html
• App_Plugins/Vorto/views/vorto.mandatoryBehaviousPicker.html
• App_Plugins/Vorto/views/vorto.poropertyEditorPicker.html
• App_Plugins/Vorto/views/vorto.rtlBehaviourPicker.html
• bin/Our.Umbraco.Vorto.dll

Umbraco Headless installation

We were as good as assured by Niels Hartvig (founder and CEO @ Umbraco) that Vorto would become part of Umbraco Headless, but it wasn't just yet.

So, if it's so easy to install, why am I writing about it?
Well, Umbraco Headless doesn't provide the option to install packages, nor does it allow you access to the repository.

If this last mention of the repository doesn't mean anything to you, I'd suggest reading up on how Umbraco Cloud handles deployment. In a nutshell : once your Umbraco Cloud installation is done for you, you get access to the git repository. Commit something on it and it gets deployed to your website.

So, how DO you deploy Vorto?

Access the git repository

In a normal Umbraco Cloud project, you can go to https://www.s1.umbraco.io/project/<your-project-name>, right-click an environment and go to "Power tools (Kudu)".

In Umbraco Headless, this option is removed, but you can still manually go to https://<your-project-name>.scm.s1.umbraco.io.

From there, go to Source control info and copy the Git-url.

Clone and commit

Clone the repository locally, add the files required for Vorto (see above) and commit/push them back to the repository.

You will have to restart your environment (again from the project management page) for the changes to be picked up.

And you're good to go.