Jose Reyero

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 from the session: Multilingual Drupal Solutions: Use Cases and Modules

Here are the slides: Multilingual Drupal Solutions: Use Cases and Modules[PDF]

And by popular request, though it was intended just as an example, here is the Drupal Multilingual Features and Modules Matrix [Google Docs]

See you next at Drupalcamp Spain in Seville, October 1st, where I will be presenting a similar session, this time in Spanish: Construyendo sitios web multilingües con Drupal 7. Casos y módulos.

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.

On Tuesday evening I'll be arriving in Berlin to take part into the Drupal Internationalization sprint that will last until May 15th. We'll be 20 developers focused on building better multilingual tools for Drupal. I think this is a great opportunity to give these features a push that has been needed for some time.

A few years ago, when I started working with Drupal I was needing some multilingual blog to publish about my work and thoughts in two languages. Then I started this Internationalization module which I've been maintaining for all that time. Now, 7 years and a lot of versions later, it is still is quite hard to build a multilingual site with it.

There is a reason for this -someone would call it an excuse- and that is: Internationalization module is not a multilingual solution. It is an API module, or a toolbox, to build many of these different solutions. Just like Drupal is not a web site, but the tool to build thousands of different great web sites.

'Yes but, How does a multilingual solution look like?'

It's been 5 years since the first version of the Internationalization module (4.7) was released. Though Drupal 6 included Content translation, and Drupal 7 provides some cool new features like Multilingual fields and really improved Language management, it stil needs some 'help' to be able to build a full featured multilingual site.

Which means yes, there will be a Drupal 7 version of Internationalization module. And here's the first Beta, which comes enhanced and plenty of new features. This is just a quick overview of the module (actually a package of 12+ modules) and some old and new features it includes. Read on or jump to the download link at the end.

Last week I came back from Brussels Drupal Dev Days, which has been a great gathering of Drupal developers. We were more than 500 people, the organization and the sessions were great -and the parties too- and I think it was a great success.

In Brussels I presented this session, with Olivier Jacquet: State of Internationalization in Drupal 7. He talked about all multilingual related improvements in Drupal 7 and some new modules (Entity Translation) and then I talked about how Internationalization module is being upgraded for Drupal 7.

Parece que el año nuevo nos va a traer, entre otras muchas cosas buenas, una nueva versión de Drupal. Por fin, el trabajo de casi tres años de desarrollo, cientos de personas, y unos cuantos miles de líneas de código nuevas, están ahí, al alcance de la mano, listos para descargar y probar.

Drupal 7 está casi a punto (RC 3 en este momento) pero los más impacientes ya llevamos meses trabajando con él, haciendo y actualizando módulos e incluso construyendo algún que otro sitio web. Parece que Papa Noel no (Definitivamente, Papa Noel no existe), pero los Reyes Magos sí que nos van a traer un Drupal 7 para jugar todo el año que viene.

I started writing a comment for this great post Then I thought there are enough comments in there already so I'd rather write my own post.

And also because this is kind of a mission statement about the question: How would you define success for the Drupal project?

It was 2003, six years ago, when I got started with Drupal. My user id is 4299. A few months later I contributed my first module (i18n). I can't tell how many modules there were at that moment, but Internationalization module is node number 5917.

Too many things have happened since then, most of them good. The community has seen an explosive growth, my job is now 99% Drupal, we've been to all these great conferences, companies have risen around Drupal, and many of us have drunk pints and pints of beer using Drupal as a excuse :-)

We are now more than 200000 users and the site has more than half a million nodes (content pages). So everything has changed quite a bit. But there's this single thing that, though it's seen many improvements, is still fundamentally the same, just bigger: drupal.org.

I'm still here in León but getting everyting ready for flying to Paris tomorrow. I'll arrive on Wednesday evening so I'm afraid I'm missing the first day.

This year I'm not doing any session, I'm taking a break. But looking forward to other people's talks and to meet lots of old and new faces there. I'm sure it's goint to be great as usual.