Jose Reyero

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.

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.

I've had a pair busy weeks doing development and maintenance for contributed modules: Internationalization, Messaging, Notifications. All of them have got some new features and are on track for stable releases soon.

However, one of the the things I've realized (again) is that I've ended up maintaining way too many huge modules and maybe one of the ways to keep them moving faster is to break them down when it makes sense, and also to hand over maintenance to some more people. Now we have Mail2web (Ian Ward is the new maintainer) and Language Icons (Freso is helping with that one), more may be coming in the next future....

The other thing I've realized is that it is exhausting maintaining both 5.x and 6.x versions of a module. That means developing and testing everything twice with slight changes which is actually harder than working on two different projects. The thing is that Drupal 6 seems to be taking some time to become the main development version for new sites and more work is done with Drupal 5 yet.

Today I got back to Drupal development after a few days just to find, to my astonishment, that things are still changing and instead of bugfixing we are still implementing new features.

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