Overview

Hello dear Drupal community. I would like to take this opportunity to update the issue summary again, because I tried earlier to have the AI write a clean issue. That went completely wrong.

In Drupal CMS 2.0, there is a new menu item on the left side of the Administration menu. It is called Current Pages. Behind it is the new Canvas module.

The name is not wrong. But it does not distinguish between normal content, as listed under Content (Node Module), and pages built with Canvas.
If you are not familiar with Drupal, then the person who wants to learn Drupal needs to know the difference between a page that I build with Canvas and a page that I create under Content. Drupal CMS, or rather the Canvas module, does not explain this anywhere in the UI.
However, this leads to massive confusion among users in languages such as German. This is mainly because we currently make no distinction in the UI between whether we create pages with the Node module or with Canvas. According to the official style guide, we officially refer to content or content items. See: https://www.drupal.org/docs/develop/user-interface-standards/interface-t.... That alone makes it difficult. Formulating clear interface texts. Now, in the navigation, we suddenly talk about pages (Canvas) and content (Node Module), which we have used to create content such as basic pages up to now. And now the navigation suddenly talks about pages, content, and utility pages.
That doesn't really make it any easier to correctly identify who's who in the entity jungle. Especially if you're not a developer and just want to create websites.

To avoid any confusion in our communication, my suggestion for the string in the UI that currently represents the word “pages” is to simply create a context. This way, we can refer to Canvas as Canvas Pages. At the very least, this makes it clearer which Drupal component is currently being used.

We don't have to rush into this, but we should make the decision by the time the recipes are finally ready to be translated, so that we can provide users with the correct information at that point. Perhaps this is simply a puzzle for the documentation team and a corresponding section in the help section.
I hope the issue is now a little clearer for everyone.

affected menu entry

Proposed resolution

If we decide to actually do this:

  • Add a translation context to the menu link (add title_context to canvas.links.menu
  • Add a translation context to the Page entity type definition: label, label_collection, label_singular, label_plural....
  • Grep for other usages of t() and TranslatableMarkup where this might be relevant too.

User interface changes

The English UI remains "Pages". For all other languages, site administrators and translators gain the ability to translate the Canvas navigation link independently from the standard Content "Pages" link.

CommentFileSizeAuthor
23-01-2026_14-11-48.png23.53 KBjoachim namyslo

Comments

joachim namyslo created an issue. See original summary.

gábor hojtsy’s picture

I'm not sure "Pages" should have a Canvas context, maybe "Landing pages" or something? Context is supposed to explain logically what it is not as a tech marker. I can see the potential confusion without the context, just not sure "Canvas" is the best context to add.

joachim namyslo’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

I have updated the summary of the issue again because I realized during the discussion in Slack that I had not communicated clearly enough what the problem actually is. I hope the new text conveys this a little better now. It's not a big deal, but it will most likely save us a lot of work when translating the UI.

penyaskito’s picture

For context: this was discussed in https://drupal.slack.com/archives/C072BF486FN/p1769174372861219

My point is:

If we change this now, we will need to change it back again when #3159848: Merge the minimal and standard install profiles into a starting point recipe happens.

The confusion comes from having "Page" as an entity type, while Drupal long-time users were already familiar with "Basic Page" from the Standard profile, and the difference is not obvious.
This confusion AFAIK is not language-specific, so don't think we should fix it through translations.
And the solution long-term is what #3159848: Merge the minimal and standard install profiles into a starting point recipe is proposing.

Having "Page (context=Canvas)" translated to something like "Canvas Pages" IMHO makes this worse, not better. An end user shouldn't necessarily need to know what Canvas is, they just want to create a "Page", or "edit" a page, not "Edit in Canvas" or "Edit a Canvas Page".

In Drupal CMS, the content type Page doesn't exist, it's "Utility Page", so shouldn't be a problem there. See #3559386: Rename the Basic page content type to Utility page (label only) for the same rationale.

gábor hojtsy’s picture

I don!t think it would be about translating it as "Canvas pages" for the UI but more about the question of whether the existing widely used translation of "Pages" is appropriate for this usage or translators translated it assuming it meant something else (a fieldable node type). Since string translation in Drupal is not version dependent if the word was primarily used in a different context, then differentiating from that would be potentially needed. But I do not know if that is the case or not. Even if it is, it may only apply to a couple languages?

penyaskito’s picture

Issue summary: View changes

If the conflict was with a bundle, that would (usually) come from config translation, not interface translation.
And we don't have a "bundle_plural" as we have "entity_type_plural" in entity type definitions.

I'm not opposing having a context (we should definitely have more of those in the entire Drupal ecosystem strings). Just that I'm not sure this is an outlier.

Adding proposed resolution about how to technically fix this if we decide to.

wim leers’s picture

Version: 1.0.3 » 1.x-dev
Component: … to be triaged » Page
Category: Bug report » Task
Priority: Normal » Minor

Updating issue metadata based on my understanding of @penyaskito's comments

wim leers’s picture

joachim namyslo’s picture

Hm I reviewed this issue. There was a discussion on l.d.o where some people said that it may be very unclear for some people what the difference between pages and content is, so the basic idea was to say ok Therese are Canvas Pages. But by now that is ok. Maybe we should discuss what we say about the difference between Pages created via Canvas and Content. But the Landing Pages idea sounds promising.