Development Seed Blog

Plug In Gives You the Best of Both Email and Web Forum Features

"Reply ABOVE this LINE to POST a COMMENT." This is how automatic email notifications from the teams' intranet blog posts look these days. And it's true! Now I can just reply to any email notification I receive and my comment will appear on our intranet. The only bad thing is that I don't have an excuse anymore for not replying right away ;-)

Typically there are two ways to carry on online discussions and to keep up with the replies - mailing lists (that may have a web interface) and web forums (that may have email subscriptions). Though each of one has its own advantages and drawbacks, trying to mix both usually ends up in long threads of differently formatted messages. Besides, mailing lists are usually exposed to spamming (worse yet if spam ends up on the web) and the "from" address is really easy to forge.

As usual, we wanted it all - the reliability and readability that come with authentication in a web forum and the ease of replying through a mailing list. Since we already had the Notifications and Messaging framework and an excellent mailhandler module to fetch incoming emails, it was just a question of putting the pieces together and adding some extra security/authentication into the recipe to get to this. 

Check the new "Mail2web" plug-in in the Notifications module. This first version is for Drupal 5. And by the way, we just released the Drupal 6 version of both Notifications and Messaging modules. The Mail2Web Drupal 6 version, however, will have to wait for the mailhandler module.

Being paranoid about security and spam, we added a more secure method for message authentication than the ones currently used. Our outgoing emails have some digitally assigned parameters that are checked when the reply comes back. Thus only emails posted as a direct 'Reply-To' operation will get in as responses. And replies to a given thread will get only into that thread, nowhere else. But best of all, these tokens are completely invisible for a regular user and should work with most email clients without the need to install any extra software. (You can set an expiration time frame for replies too).

So what do I need to to do to get it working?

Drupal Is Now a Lot More Multilingual

With the right mix of modules, you can use the current version of Drupal to build multilingual websites. But this works much more in a "get the job done" sort of way and doesn't provide a good comprehensive solution. Luckily that will soon change.

As I announced before, the multilingual system we've been working on (called i18n) has been committed to Drupal core in its next release. What this means is that Drupal 6 out of the box will allow for content in multiple languages and, using some contributed modules, you'll be able to use it to build complex multilingual sites. Also it means and that all contributed modules will be able to support multiple languages, which currently isn't the case. This will make it much easier to build extensive multilingual websites on Drupal, and I hope it will trigger more multilingual websites to be built on Drupal. And even better, if there's a high demand we'll be able to continue improving multilingual support and adding on new features.

After months of planning, building, and posting patches, there are now enough features in Drupal core to say that it is truly a multilingual system with some powerful language features. That’s right, Drupal 6 will now handle multilingual content out of the box.

However, there is one important piece that still needs to go into core before we can really say “we got it,” and that’s the ability to translate user defined strings for any part of Drupal. A lot was said and written about this in Drupal Groups and our development mailing list and that has led us to engineer some practical, integratable, and reusable solutions. I think we've finally got a powerful one, but we need your help to get it into Drupal 6.

I ran some tests of the latest CiviCRM version (1.7.beta.9284) with Drupal 5.1  to see what improvements had been made to allow civiCRM to work better on a multilingual site. I've been testing it on Haiti Innovation,
which will roll out multilingual content in French and English and
integrate with civiCRM at a few levels.  Making civiCRM work on a
multilingual website is clearly on the forefront for the folks who have
been building civiCRM. This testing has generated some great
conversations with Donald Lobo, civiCRM founder, and Piotr Szotkowski,
the lead i18n person at civiCRM.  If you are looking to integrate
civiCRM into a multilingual Drupal website, this post will help to show
what is currently possible, some of the current limitations, and a
glimpse at future integration options along with some ideas.