Directions for language support in Drupal 8

If you have ever tried to make a single foreign language or multilingual site in Drupal, you can probably attest to the fact that it starts off nicely but then hits gotchas and needs awkward workarounds and compromises. Suzannne Kennedy's Drupalcamp Montreal 2010 talk is in fact a very good sign of that with lots of practical advice.

To eliminate these hurdles and add more universal (multi)language support to Drupal core, Dries Buytaert named me an initiative leader for multilingual support in Drupal 8 at the start of May 2011. While that sounds like a very official thing, all it means is that it ensures someone tries to be on top of the work and continues to encourage others to collaborate on it. It does not magically solve all the issues and plug in the missing functionality.

However, there has been some great work done so far on the initiative by many individuals both as part of our Berlin sprint, ongoing work in the issue queue and hopefully by the time this session is presented a great and successful Montreal coding sprint as well.

The goal of this session is to outline the major concepts behind the (multi)language support work going on as well as share the progress being made. Drupal 8 is still very much in progress at the time of the presentation, so no clear-cut final solutions will be presented. Your input is welcome and I do plan to hold a BoF for more in-person discussion and use case sharing after this session.

If you'd like to make a contribution in the meantime, you are very welcome in the issue queue as well as the Montreal sprint right before the camp! Sign up for that at http://groups.drupal.org/node/158434