Blog Friday November 21
Jose Reyero
pinger

Jose is the lead developer of multilingual solutions in Drupal. He built the i18n module that greatly improved multilingual functionality in Drupal 5 and 6 and is currently working on improvements that will become part of core Drupal 7. He also leads the development on the Messaging and Notifications frameworks in Drupal, which are used in subscription handling and have become very powerful features within Drupal.

Archive
Internationalization Huddle in Budapest
Feb 13, 2007
by Jose Reyero

They say that Budapest is a beautiful city, and considering it’s right on the Danube I can believe it. It also happens to be the home of two outstanding Drupal developers - Gabor Hojtsy and Karoly Negyesi (chx).

I’m getting ready to start working on some patches for Drupal 6 to rectify the missing multilingual features, so it seemed like a perfect time to meet up with Gabor and Karoly to put our heads together.

Development Seed agrees and is sending me to meet with them in a room for two days to see what we can get done. And since I’m what is bringing Gabor and Karoly together, I think I’ll try to keep them locked up with their laptops for as long as I can :-)

Our main goal is to start work on some patches for Drupal 6 that will bring together the basics needed for multilingual sites. These can then later be extended by contributed modules. Our official plan is the following:

  • Abstract language settings out of locale module to extend language management possibilities
  • Get a basic mechanism set up for language associations, extendable first for nodes and then for other objects
  • Look into path handling and language detection and see how we can integrate it with Drupal's new menu system
  • Explore some mechanisms for variables and configurable text translation

We'll be focusing the most on just a few issues so that we create a good starting point that can turn into something bigger. I’ll be blogging from Budapest so check back to see what we’ve come up with.

The weather forecast for this week in Budapest looks nice, by the way. I'll keep you posted.

, , ,
3 Comments
Multilingual Content
Feb 14, 2007
daniel.nolde

Hey Jose,

i'd love to see a better support of multilingual content in Drupal. In terms of basic CMS Functionality, this is a real weakness of Drupal. Workaurounds like the internationalisation Module are helpful, but i think we need a clean support for that in core.

Why not use the versioning/revision-capabilities of Drupal to support multilingual content?
By extending the node_revisions table by a language-field, there could be several "current" version, up to one for each language...
So referencing a mutlilingual node via it's ID would be problem.
Queries to the database would have to reflect that, of course. What would be the downsides of this approach?

Cheers,

Daniel

Károly is his first name.
Feb 14, 2007
Seed Friend

Károly is his first name.

Thanks :) that got
Feb 16, 2007
Seed Friend

Thanks :) that got transposed when our editor wanted to use a full name rather than chx and we never looked back over it :)