A Recap of the Multilingual Drupal Session at DrupalCon
Drupal About Halfway To Being Fully Multilingual
The Multilingual Drupal session was held yesterday afternoon at DrupalCon Barcelona. The big news of the session was that we officially changed the status of the mission to make Drupal fully multilingual from "making progress" to "about halfway there." And even more exciting is the hope that we'll reach our mission with the release of Drupal 7.
Gábor kicked off the session by explaining some of the key concepts surrounding multilingual Drupal. He also went into some detail on XLIFF computer aided translation tools and showed a pretty neat demo of how you can use XLIFF to translate content on your site. Depending on your desktop application, you can also tap into translation memories to help speed up repetitive phrases and words. After demoing these translation tools, Gábor highlighted the main multilingual features that are in Drupal 6 core and what's left for Drupal 7.
Jose then took over to talk about the i18n (internationalization) module and described what it used to do and what it does now. His approach with i18n is to follow a pattern of decreasing contributed modules' responsibilities when they'd best exist in core. Once DrupalCon comes to a close this weekend, Jose will be sprinting to get the i18n module upgrade completed, and then will focus his efforts on jamming on the pieces left to get in Drupal 7 to make it fully multilingual. It was good and very motivating to hear Jose say that he's not interested in getting 90% of the way there - he's going for 100% or broke on this.
We at Development Seed will continue to support this work by sponsoring Jose's time on internationalization and by giving status updates and reports via our blog. Stay tuned for modules to try, patches to test, and issue queues to discuss the latest efforts toward a fully multilingual Drupal 7.
My apologies to everyone hoping to watch the session via the recording we promised to post. Unfortunately we're having problems with our video camera and it looks like we won't be able to record any of the sessions ourselves. Drupal is streaming some of them here.
thanks for the
thanks for the slides!
streaming link is dead..
i18n can get you there now
Hi Benjamin,
That's great the World Social forum will use Drupal. It looks like they used Plone last year (http://wsf2007.org/)?
The i18n module package can help you build a complex multilingual site right now. Another big help in combination w/ the i18n package is nodeasblock which makes block translations easier since it lets you use nodes as blocks instead of blocks. I recommend the i18n group and the i18n handbook pages on Drupal.org as other good starting points.
cheers,
Ian
Multilingual Now!
The World Social Forum for 2008 needs a multilingual site of quite to be a workhorse for a lot of languages, for people to propose and list activities all over the world.
There are some resources, not commensurate with the size of the project, but is there anything important you would suggest attempt to be backported to Drupal 5, or any other advice before this site begins an extremely tight development timeline?
Thanks.