Blog: Drupalconbarcelona2007

International Development, Agriculture, and Smarter Tools

I just landed in Rome for the Web2forDev conference where I was invited to speak on how social software can be used to connect geographically diverse teams. The timing of the conference is fantastic. It’s eAgriculture week here in Rome, so I suspect that many of the 350 participants will have a lot of on the ground experience. 

There are a lot of great presentations in the queue that I want to sit in on. The session Cairo Concept: Village to Village Knowledge Sharing sounds fascinating – it will discuss a project that links small town together in an online network to help them better share knowledge, news, and expertise. I’m also excited to learn more about USAID’s Amazon Basin Conservation Initiative, which not only sounds interesting and necessary but is also of special interest to me as one of our very first clients back in 2003 - Amazon Alliance - worked in this area.  I’m also looking forward to catching my friend Tobias’ session explaining how African civil society organizations are and could be using blogs, wikis, and social networking tools to better use their limited internet connections.

I arrived in Rome straight from Barcelona, Spain and DrupalCon, which was a spectacular conference overall. I came away from it very energized about the future role of Drupal in international development.

After many conversations with Jose (who I was able to work with for most of September out of his Leon office) and Gábor  (who I talked with at both FrOSCon and DrupalCon), I’m extremely confident that Drupal will be a leading multilingual platform.  We are standing behind future investment in making Drupal multilingual by working on the i18n module that makes Drupal multilingual and getting more of this functionality into the core of the system. We’re also really excited to be working more closely with Gábor to make it easier to translate Drupal into more languages.

Our not so hidden agenda is to follow the huge aid investments for improved connectivity in developing countries made over the last decade with a few open source publishing platform that will make it simple for people all over the world to generate local content in their native language.

Drupal About Halfway To Being Fully Multilingual

The Multilingual Drupal session was held yesterday afternoon at DrupalCon Barcelona. The big news of the session was that we officially changed the status of the mission to make Drupal fully multilingual from "making progress" to "about halfway there." And even more exciting is the hope that we'll reach our mission with the release of Drupal 7. 

Gábor  kicked off the session by explaining some of the key concepts surrounding multilingual Drupal. He also went into some detail on XLIFF computer aided translation tools and showed a pretty neat demo of how you can use XLIFF to translate content on your site. Depending on your desktop application, you can also tap into translation memories to help speed up repetitive phrases and words. After demoing these translation tools, Gábor highlighted the main multilingual features that are in Drupal 6 core and what's left for Drupal 7. 

Jose then took over to talk about the i18n (internationalization) module and described what it used to do and what it does now. His approach with i18n is to follow a pattern of decreasing contributed modules' responsibilities when they'd best exist in core. Once DrupalCon comes to a close this weekend, Jose will be sprinting to get the i18n module upgrade completed, and then will focus his efforts on jamming on the pieces left to get in Drupal 7 to make it fully multilingual. It was good and very motivating to hear Jose say that he's not interested in getting 90% of the way there - he's going for 100% or broke on this. 

We at Development Seed will continue to support this work by sponsoring Jose's time on internationalization and by giving status updates and reports via our blog. Stay tuned for modules to try, patches to test, and issue queues to discuss the latest efforts toward a fully multilingual Drupal 7.

My apologies to everyone hoping to watch the session via the recording we promised to post. Unfortunately we're having problems with our video camera and it looks like we won't be able to record any of the sessions ourselves. Drupal is streaming some of them here.

Join Us Thursday at 2:00 pm in Barcelona or Online

Everyone who wants to integrate Drupal with an sms campaign should come to tomorrow's session SMS and Drupal. It's starting right after lunch at 2:00 pm in the Picktek room. The goal of the session is to let people know about some of the exciting things you can do with sms and about some of the great tools that already exist. There will be a live stream of the talk from the official DrupalCon website.

I'm moderating tomorrow's session and had a great meeting today with all the players to prep for it. Will White, the Summer of Coder who worked on sms integration, and his SoC mentor Ian Ward planned out a demonstration of the new sms API, while Jeff Miccolis flushed out some of his past experiences with sms campaigns to talk about, including one with Planned Parenthood. We also got to meet Chad Phillips for the first time, who was a huge help to Will this summer in getting sms to email integration working (which allows small Drupal sites to have free sms integration). Chad will end the presentiment with a demo of his work on a two-way email gateway functionality.

Everyone who was at the Google Summer of Code presentations today got to hear a short teaser of the work Will has done. Tomorrow you'll get to hear all the details and see a live demo. You can watch Will's screen capture SMS Email Gateway + Send to Phone Inline SMS Filter for Drupal if you want to get another sneak peak. 

Best DrupalCon Ever?

Over 420 members of the Drupal community were at Citilab this morning to kick off DrupalCon Barcelona 2007. Among them were eight members of the Development Seed team. After a busy and exciting summer, it's great to have a group of us here for a week of pure Drupal.

Today's sessions include an introduction to Form API 3, an in-depth look at the state of internationalization, and the Google Summer of Code Showcase. We're lucky to have several SoC students attending and we'll get to share some of the great work that we did this summer. I'll talk briefly about the SMS Framework project, but I'll go into further detail on Thursday during the SMS and Drupal session. We'll also be recording that session and posting it here on the blog.

This is an exciting year for DrupalCon. The slogan for the show is "the best DrupalCon ever." With the large number of quality sessions, the ideal location, and the number of motivated attendees, I think this will be possible.