Drupal

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

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?'