Blog: Cms

A Look at What Drupal Can Do for Your Multilanguage Content

Gábor Hojtsy is a lead developer of expanded multilingual support in Drupal. You can read his other guest blog posts here and here.

To cater to the needs of multilanguage websites, Drupal and other content management systems should take into account the different uses of these sites and the unique content and interfaces they provide. For example, a search site where content will not be translated might need different languages in its interface, while a personal blog where posts are entered in different languages might need many different features.

I asked the Drupal community to tell me the use cases they used in internationalized websites in 2006. After going through this data and filtering the comments, I have identified the following practical use cases for websites built with an English-based system, such as Drupal, but that may also support foreign languages.

English (Factory Default) Only

This is the simplest use case. In fact, it means that the English "factory default" text can be used in the project and that English content is posted. User specified interface text is in English. This monolingual scenario is the simplest, and is always supported in every system.

English (Customized) Only

When one needs a customized English language website (different site design or different wording to account for U.S. and British English differences or stylistic requirements, for example), it is still quite close to what the system provides by default. User specified interface text is in English, and only some text and design elements need to be changed. Drupal makes this possible with the locale module, which is often suggested to be used to make arbitrary text modifications for stylistic reasons. Drupal 6 includes some optimization for this use case, letting site administrators include a short list of customized strings in the settings file and use that without the locale module.

Single Foreign Language Only

This monolingual scenario occurs when a website is built with a particular system, but the factory default language is completely replaced. This case requires that the interface text be completely translatable and that the language of the resulting site be configurable so its web pages show the correct content and the proper language code. Also, user specified interface text must be given in the actual language used. Drupal 5 supports this scenario with the locale module but does not give content the proper language association. This is improved in Drupal 6 with some performance improvements for single foreign language sites and content language associations.

If people can't find your site it doesn't matter how good it is. But thanks to the organization of Drupal, the OSS content management system we use to design most of our websites, these websites receive a high ranking with most search engines.

In a recent discussion on the CivicSpaceLabs
listserv Neil Drumm, the chief developer for CS, wrote that while CS and Drupal sites do not have a master index page for search engines it’s not needed because of the natural page linking that occurs within Drupal. Boris Mann, chief developer at , explains how and why this works:

“I can tell you that from my personal experience, Drupal sites are completely spidered by all search engines, and are naturally ranked
*very* highly. In fact, I like to say "search engine optimized by
default".


"The reason for this is the built in links to other content that
appears everywhere. e.g. pager, category links, recent posts blocks,
etc.”


Here is a great list of OS CMS's http://www.la-grange.net/cms. You can browse lists of open source CMS's:

• by email
• by IRC, Instant Messaging
• by perl
• by php
• by m4 or Makefile
• by python
• by TCL
• Miscellaneous (C, Mod Apache, ...)
• Weblog, Journal, Blog APIs
• by Java

You also might benefit from the forum discussions on OpenSource CMS.

TechSoup (http://www.techsoup.org) has three great articles to get organizations thinking about CMS.  If you are thinking about what your organization needs to have a new generation website read all three of these articles... 1)Knowing When You Need a CMS A CMS won't do your work for you, but it can be a great tool for helping you get it done http://www.techsoup.org/howto/articlepage.cfm?ArticleId=540 2)What Does a Content Management System Do? Learn about the basic abilities of a CMS and how it can help your organization http://www.techsoup.org/howto/articlepage.cfm?ArticleId=548 3) Choosing a CMS How to find the right content management system for you http://www.techsoup.org/howto/articlepage.cfm?ArticleId=561

What would you need to recreate the Go Ask Alice plumming on Drupal? Not much more than the core. The one feature I wonder about is when you go to an article and at the bottom there are related articles, for example on this page about metabolife. Is this automated or is it a pick and choose feature by the editor? Maybe when the editor publishes the article in queue a list of related articles found by automated keyword query appear for the choosing and the editor adds the related articles to the body of the article from the query pool. Otherwise, the plumming is easy...I would really like to know more about their human network and how much staff time and by who exactly Go Ask Alice breathes.

Why don't you want to try it?

When we first started Development Seed, with the goal of working one on one with NGOs to help them create websites that help their organization both internally and externally, the problem seemed simple… non-profits do not have the financial resources to pay for a good site. If they do get some cash on hand to pay for a site or a volunteer to build it the investment is traditionally looked at as a one time expense, just like printing a newsletter. Thus the site never changes nor grows and the organization is not capitalizing on the Internet as a method of communicating, which is an ongoing process, but rather just having some basic background literature in electronic format.