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Tutorial step 8 – Decide your vocabulary

In this tutorial step, we'll teach you how to use the Microcopy feature to modify the terminology used in your marketplace.

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Different marketplaces use different words when talking about their users and listings. Sometimes they might be "buyers" and "sellers", in other cases "guests" and "hosts".

In Biketribe, when it comes to what is being offered and by whom, we'd like the user interface to talk about "bikes" and "bike owners".

In the world of user interfaces, such terminology scattered here and there is referred to as "Microcopy". The New Sharetribe comes with an editor that allows you to edit any texts in your user interface.

Let's start by navigating to "Content → Microcopy".

Changing the text of a specific link

In the top bar of your marketplace, there's a link that says "Post a new listing". We'd like this word to say "List your bike". Let's find the word. Click the editor and hit Ctrl + F (on Windows) or Cmd + F (on Mac) to open the search. Type "Post" to the search.

Searching once only returns the first instance. You'll notice that "Post" is mentioned in several different places in the user interface. Each of these has its own corresponding "key" that describes where the text is displayed:

  • “TopbarDesktop.createListing”
  • “EditListingPage.titleCreateListing”
  • “TopbarMobileMenu.newListingLink”

When editing, you should not change the key. Instead, you should change the value that comes after the key. For all these keys, the default value is "Post a new listing". Replace this with "List your bike" in all these.

Save changes.

Changing a specific word everywhere in the user interface

It can be convenient to do multiple changes at once to a document. However, a word of warning: remember how we mentioned in the previous chapter that "When editing, you should not change the key."? In some cases, some words may appear both in the texts as well as the keys. Before doing any kind of "replace all" operation, you should quickly go through the document and make sure that the word you are replacing is not present in the key values. If it is, you need to make sure that you do the changes only to the texts, not the keys.

That being said, if there is a word that you want to replace in all sections of the site, you can do an operation that quickly changes all instances of that text. To do this, select all of the text in the editor (click the editor and hit "CTRL + A" in Windows or "CMD + A" in Mac), copy it, and paste it to your favorite text editor. Then, do a "replace all" operation that finds every occurrence of the word you're looking for with the target word.

After you are done, copy the entire text and paste it into the Microcopy editor, and then save the content.

Now the language in your marketplace is all about bikes. There's one more step before we're done: linking everything we've built together through the footer. Go to Step 9: Edit the footer.

Can't find what you're looking for?

Reach out to our support team by email, or consult the Sharetribe Developer Community at Sharetribe's Flex development Slack Channel. You can also contact our support team through the chat widget in Flex Console.