Blog: International

The next version of Drupal will make it much easier to build complex multilingual websites, and it will make it a whole lot easier to edit and maintain the sites too. One of the key changes is that it will be much easier to translate the instructions built into the backend of Drupal websites - called strings in Drupal speak, this refers to all the text you see in a typical CMS that tells you what content you’re looking at and what to do with it. (Note: This is currently in Drupal’s patch approval queue so it may not make it into the next release of Drupal core, but it will be available. Go give it a test run and give some feedback. It will make Jose, a lead developer, very happy.)

As I fired off requests to Google's geocoder API to plot several thousand points on a map for a recent project, a quick calculation showed that only about a third of the data returned valid latitude and longitude information. The data set I was dealing with was international - mapping members from nearly every country - so I knew I would have some issues, but only a third successful?

Iraqis have seen a lot more campaigning and advertising for tomorrow’s elections than for the previous one, and the candidates have gotten more sophisticated too. Not only are they using typical media sources like television and newspapers, but some candidates have been sending text messages to try to bring voters to their side. ABC News reports: