i18n
Evolving Web used Drupal to develop a dynamic CMS for Travelocity's AllHotels.com website. AllHotels is a reservation website used by thousands of customers to book hotels around the world.
Managing translation workflows is an important and challenging aspect of multilingual site building. Translation can be time-consuming and expensive, and there are some exciting new Drupal modules and lots of best practises to help you streamline how you translate content and user interface strings in Drupal 7. This week, I recorded an Acquia webinar on multilingual workflows, and I'll be covering the topic in more detail at a training at DrupalCon Munich.
Multilingual websites are complicated, due to the wide variety of ways to convey multilingual content to users. Each multilingual website seems to come with a different set of requirements for how content translation is handled. In this post, I'll take a look at approaches to translating content in Drupal 7 and the new possibilities that the Entity Translation module provides.
This September, the Montreal Drupal community held our first large-scale Drupal code sprint. The event was held from September 14-16 at Notman, and carried on through the Drupal Camp until September 18th. The sprint was spearheaded by Gábor Hojtsy who is leading the Drupal 8 Multilingual intiative. Francesco Placella, who has contributed to Drupal 7’s field translation API as well as the Entity Translation module, was also a key contributor.
Montreal's March Drupal Meetup was held this past Wednesday at Notman House, a co-working space and hub for entrepreneurship and tech innovation in Montreal. I think the exciting new venue was at least partly responsible for the fantastic turnout of 28 Drupal enthusiasts.
After having built one multilingual website in Drupal 7 (our company website), I've had some time to look over the new i18n module. I've put together some observations about the changes in functionality I've noticed so far.
Creating a multilingual Drupal site includes tranlsating not only content and interface strings, but also things as basic as paths. This can be a challenge when working with modules like Views, which only accept one version of the path to a given View.
When building a multilingual site, it's important to ensure that the entire interface can be translated. All knids of site elements are thrown into the mix including taxonomy terms, block titles, views labels, and dates.
Back in October, I gave a talk at Drupal Camp Montreal called Tips & Tricks for Building a Multilingual Site with Drupal. It was a great opportunity to review the multilingual features that we use on a day-to-day basis.