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I know Drupal Gardens doesn't include Internationalization module nor other multilingual goodies or contributed modules, which makes sense to me since i18n is not really and end-user-friendly kind of animal. However I've heard that because of that you cannot build a multilingual site with Drupal Gardens and this may not be really true. Have you heard about the guys that didn't know it was impossible so they did it?

So, since Drupal is so powerful and flexible, that they say ;-), I was wondering how hard it could be to build some basic multilingual web site only with the modules and features they provide with Drupal Gardens. Let me see... you have all Drupal core -which includes Locale and Content translation-, you have Views, you have Pathauto, then you have Block visibility options which are more flexible than some people imagine... It seems there are some features missing but we'll try to substitute them by some.. imagination.. (that you may call ugly workarounds too).

There are a lot of modules for Drupal. One of them, Domain Access, enables multiple different domains on a single Drupal site and allows setting different variable values for each domain. Another of them, Internationalization, allows different variable values for each language. What was missing was a mechanism to handle that variables consistently and then allowing to mix these two 'variable realms' setting specific values for specific combinations of Domain and Language.

A bit late, I know, but here's the material and links from the Session Florian Loretan and I did in Drupalcon London 2011 last month.

The video and the slides from the session: Multilingual Drupal Solutions - Use Cases and Modules - Slides

When I first heard of the idea of doing a Drupal Internationalization code sprint from Karsten Frohwein I thought that though being a good idea, setting up such an event was so difficult and would take so much time an energy that we'd had little chances to get it done. It is certainly hard to find the time, the place, get together all the people from different countries and get something started.

It happens sometimes that good ideas become reality. So first of all, big Thanks to the sprint organizers who were able to put everything together to help a team of 20 people from several countries to meet at some place and get something done. They kept everything going smoothly for us to be able to focus on what we like to do: Building great Drupal code that we are going to use later to build great Internet sites.