Development Seed Blog

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.

Here, finally, is our dynamic object translation solution. It has some important features, including

• Single interface for *all* translatable strings, including dynamic and static
• Simple API so it can be used in all Drupal modules
• Won't slow down single language sites on Drupal

This is currently in the patch queue and needs some love, feedback, and optimization before it makes it into Drupal, so please help us out by testing it out and leaving your feedback.

There are some other related patches in the queue that we've been posting about in the last few weeks, such as the translation module and the language switcher block. Feel free to review them all, but the one that needs the most attention is definitely the dynamic object translation, so take some time to review, improve, and push it forward to where it belongs – in Drupal 6.

We’re counting the days to the final feature freeze for Drupal 6, so think of this as a call to arms to all the people interested in having a fully multilingual Drupal 6. Developers, testers, and reviewers wanted.