Recently I’ve been working on Drupal 7 core to make it more “multilingual friendly,” as well as on a new Internationalization release for Drupal 6 that has some needed features. In this post, I’ll update you on where we are and where we are going.

Specifically looking at Drupal 7 core development, there are two important patches in the queue that need some special attention:

• Write locales data API, which provides the basic and badly needed support for user defined strings translation
• Translatable fields, which is a try to build on the new Drupal 7 fields and make them translatable

You can see the the full list of pending issues here, tagged with “i18n sprint”.

For the Internationalization module, we’re focusing on two features for the next version:

• Fully translatable views using the latest views localization hooks
• Translation and better synchronization for CCK fields and values

For a full roadmap, see the Internationalization 6.x Roadmap.

This is all happening after a very successful past couple of months of Drupal 6 multilingual work.

During this time, we got out the first stable release of the Internationalization module, which was really much better than what I had expected thanks to the enthusiastic help of nedjo, catch, and stella.

We had a couple week long virtual Drupal i18n code sprint where we went through all language related issues in the current Drupal development version. Not many patches were committed, but we made some great progress in identifying existing issues and work that needs to be done, and really improved most of the patches already in the queue.

Then at DrupalCon DC we had a Multilingual Drupal session, which I had the pleasure to co-present with Gábor Hojtsy and Roger Lopez. We discussed the current multilingual features in Drupal 6 and the development status and needs of Drupal 7, and then we heard about a really interesting Sony Music case study , presented by Roger. At the end, I was happy with how the session went. While there weren’t that many people there, I think we’ll see a higher interest at DrupalCon Paris, and the interest in multilingual Drupal is larger in Europe than in the States, likely because of obvious geographical reasons.

As you can see, Drupal has a great team of developers from all over the world working to make the system truly multilingual. If you want to get involved, patches are welcome.