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.

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.

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.

This is an old post I sent to drupal-devel mailing list more than 3 years ago, I would like to revive as I think finally the small core / many distributions idea is gaining some ground. I haven't changed anything from the original post here, http://lists.drupal.org/pipermail/development/2005-November/011428.html

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A "great developer platform" is how I see Drupal, and I'm sure most of the developers too. But the thing is: we need some focus, some targets to agree on.

The problem is: currently we are pretending Drupal -core- to be too many things at the same time, mostly that great developer platform (1), but also an out of the box ready to use community portal (2) or kind of that. And the consequence is we are handling too many issues when fixing bugs for 'Drupal core' that are too specific of some more 'user level, site specific' modules.

As it seems a brand new Drupal localization site is coming to life any of these days, we still need to work out some issues like how the translations will be packaged to support all of our existing deployment models and maybe some new ones.

We've been thinking and talking for some time about it. This is about my specific proposal for solving this packaging issue.

Well, if you want to see a specific implementation of translations downloaded on the fly by the installer check out the Open Atrium latest (dev) version. As I explain below, this is a limited use case (Drupal distribution with known set of modules), so we've gone through some shortcuts here. But anyway it is a nice proof of concept of how you can automatically download/import/update translations. Yeah, it works!

Here I am again, in Washington DC attending the Drupal Conference.

This time I'm doing two presentations: