Development Seed Blog

Hello from Sunnyvale California. We are ready for the start of OSCMS tomorrow when we will present on multilingual Drupal sites and the i18n contributed module. A lot has happened in the past several months to work toward a more multilingual Drupal, as well as improve upon the already great i18n module. Jose Reyero, the developer behind the i18n module, went to Budapest last month to meet up with Karoly Negyesi and Gabor Hojtsy to put their heads together and make advancements for Drupal 6 and multilingual handling.

The presentation tomorrow will cover a quick recap of where multilingualism and Drupal stand in Drupal 5, what the contributed module i18n.module serves to accomplish apart from core in Drupal 5, some practical and complicated problems in i18n for Drupal multilingual sites including examples from a large international archive organization and multilingual site, and advancements made in Budapest and the last couple months to get greater core support for features that belong in core, while adapting contributed modules for these changes.

Here are some slides that we are going to use!

A multilingual Drupal revolves around four main issues, which are: language detection, negotiation, and path handling; simple string translation; structured data translation; and multilingual variables. Major advancement on the first of the four issues happened in Budapest, as well as the last - multilingual variables. The other two issues were discussed and outlined. Tomorrow's presentation will serve to highlight the work done on these four issues, and explain what the future looks like for multilingual Drupal, with both core and contributed projects involved.

Hope to see you all there! But if not we will be posting audio and video form the day as quickly as possible.