multilanguage

After reviewing language support and translation for many of Drupal's pieces, we arrived at a pretty complex question, building multilingual navigation. The question is especially of importance because we often need to put translated content in menus, and the cross of translation of content and translation of menus can easily get us into the woods. Let's build some simple solutions for different use cases to see how to think of multilingual menus.

In the previous part of this series, we talked in detail about translations for nodes. For this next piece, I've promised to cover site settings and layout (blocks and friends). As the multilingual landscape progressed (Jose Reyero released the first beta version of the Internationalization module for Drupal 7!), I decided to dedicate this piece to site settings only. That sounds pretty basic and boring, but we have some good news and improvements here that developers should hear too! Read on for more information on how this crucial piece of the puzzle looks like in Drupal 7.

In the second part of my article series, before we got on a developer detour, we discussed that Drupal's software interface translation can be pre-provided and collaborated on by the community, but this time we turn to your own content. What's considered content on a Drupal site? Well, in a broad sense, anything that you enter beyond the software user interface translation. For this article, we will limit our discussion to nodes only, and move on to the rest of the structure and page building elements in later pieces.

As promised at the end of the previous piece of my Drupal 7 multilingual post series, this part is turning to developers to spread some awareness of new features and possibilities in Drupal 7. We've talked about context support and new language selection features, and I'd like to share some tips with you to use them right. I'd also like to share an updated version of my Drupal 6 localization cheat sheet as well as its appropriate version for Drupal 7 with you and look at how can you hook into the heart of the language system.

The previous piece in my series covered the basic language features in Drupal 7, including setting up which languages are available. Merely adding a language to your site will not make Drupal do much though. The site "in that language" will still look entirely English. The reason for this is that Drupal works with English as the default interface language and will fall back on that each time you have no translation for something. Until you provide Drupal with translations, it will still be entirely English. While weaved into my Drupal 7 multilingual series, changes explained herein affect Drupal users on all Drupal versions. Let's see how obtaining and working with translations changed not so recently and how can you get most out of that on Drupal 7!

This is part one in a series of posts on the new multilingual features in Drupal 7 core and contrib. I was sadly not as involved in the core mutilingual work that I wanted to (was busy working on localize.drupal.org), so I need a refresher myself on some of the finer details of what is going on. Therefore my journey through the new features, which I thought would be useful for you dear readers too. Thankfully many bright folks picked up the work and drove a good bunch of new functionality in terms of multilingual support into the new version. Let's begin!

I've had the luck again to join Jose A. Reyero and present about the multilanguage features of Drupal and its contributions at Drupalcon DC last week. I've had a presentation on the topic at Drupalcon Szeged last August, and we had a session on the topic at Drupalcon Boston last March with Jose. So looking back it almost felt like we are going to repeat ourselves.

What made this time special however is that we have a huge amount of experience gathered from users of the modules and Drupal core itself, and we see our strengths, real use cases and problems better. Previous sessions covered the concepts, but this time we had the fantastic Roger Lopez join us as third panelist, who talked about the Drupal 6 based multilanguage platform used to host Britney Spears', Pink's and other Sony stars' sites already. There was a nice Drupal.org front page post on their solutions and contributions while we were in DC. It is well worth a read!

So the panel ended up with me talking about Drupal core and some broader issues, Jose talking about Drupal 7 plans and i18n features and Roger talking about solving some of the tasks they have faced on Drupal 6 with core, the well known contributed modules and some custom development. He also called for involvement in some of the unresolved issues in his presentation. Finally we took some great questions and wrapped up.

I believe this was our best Drupal multilanguage talk so far, but unfortunately it was not videotaped. So all we can share with you are our slides in presentation order. Enjoy!

• Gábor Hojtsy: Drupal core multilanguage (3.7MB PDF)
• Jose A. Reyero: Multilingual Drupal (1.4 MB PDF)
• Roger Lopez: Multilingual Drupal in the wild (1.5 MB PDF)

I just noticed the new #translatable module popping up via a note in a Drupal issue. Historically there was i18n module, which provided the de-facto way to build multilanguage sites. Then through some smaller modules, competition and somewhat different thinking came in with localizer module.