International and multilingual Drupal sitesI gave a presentation about “International and multilingual Drupal sites” to the friendly folks at the Vancouver Drupal Users Group on November 20, 2008. Follow the link above to see the slides.

This was a great opportunity for me to investigate Drupal 6’s internationalisation (i18n). As part of the research for my paper, I set up a basic Drupal 6 site with UI strings and content translated into Japanese and English languages. I found that Drupal 6 has very good support for multilingual site hosting. However, there were some tricky aspects to installing the right modules and then setting up the system configuration. I summarise them in the presentation, but it’s probably worth writing some better documentation.

I was impressed by the state of i18n in Drupal 6. With the Drupal core alone, it’s equal to Joomla! 1.0.x plus Joomfish plus sh404SEF (which is what I use now for jdlh.com). Add in the international module and its three companions,  it looks comparable to what I think Joomla 1.5 plus Nooku will deliver. That’s a guess, because I haven’t ponied up the sponsorship fees needed to get Nooku at this stage of its development.

This was my first visit to Vancouver’s Drupal UG, and my first visit to the Gastown offices of the meeting host, Raincity Studios. I was a half-hour late getting there, due in part to an interesting Google Maps glitch that’s worth its own post. Afterwards a group retired to a gastro-pub, Shebeen Whisk(e)y House, for pleasant conversation, and an astounding whiskey menu with 160+(!) options. Wow. I was happy to make the acquaintance there of some Ardbeg 10 Year Old.

1 Comment »