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.

I'm leaving on Sunday, so these days I've been quite busy preparing everything for the Boston Drupalcon 2008.

To the question "Will Drupal 6 be multilingual?", I just can say that it will be "more multilingual than Drupal 5", but really cannot give a straight "Yes" answer as it is not really fully multilingual because there are a big number of parts that cannot yet be localized or translated.
This is the latest try and our last chance for Drupal 6. There's a very minimum set of patches to at least allow contributed modules to hook into the right places of Drupal core and have a fully multilingual Drupal 6 without using dirty hacks or core patches in contributed modules.

• http://drupal.org/node/155047, Object translation. Wrapper function for contrib modules
• http://drupal.org/node/155381, Minimum support for multilingual variables
• http://drupal.org/node/155282, Add db rewriting to blocks query

Post to drupal.org forum

Update: Preparing a DEP draft for implementation in Drupal 4.8

We are in the proccess of adding full multi language support to Drupal.