sprint

While Drupal improves its multilingual features with every version and there were numerous improvements with Drupal 6 and 7 especially, there are still lots of things for which contributed modules are needed, and multilingual support is not consistent (neither in some cases usable) with these modules. There is sizable customization and glue-code building required.

Karsten Frohwein thought to take these problems and organize a group of contributors to take a deep look at them, conceptualize on better solutions and do actual implementation in a concentrated environment. Thankfully, as with great ideas, he got lots of support from companies and individuals interested, so the Internationalization SprintCamp is a go between the 11th and 15th of May 2011 in Berlin. Key contributors are being confirmed one by one, so this event is promising to be a great and high energy one for improving multilingual features and fixing bugs. There is place for up to 20 people, so we are looking for developers who can join and help. Contact Karsten through the Impressum page or leave a comment here with your contact information (such as drupal.org username or user URL).

The sprint is sponsored by the German Drupal-Initiative e. V., Comm-press, undpaul Drupal Development, Acquia and others. We are planning to do couch-surfing to reduce costs and increase fun. If you'd like to help sponsor, contact Karsten.

Ps. we will hang around in the #drupal-i18n IRC channel throughout the sprint, and distribute information and guidance for anybody who'd like to join and help virtually. See http://drupal.org/irc for more information on Drupal's IRC channels.

A few days ago Károly Négyesi (known to most as chx) announced that he organizes a (virtual) cirtical issue queue cleanup event for the 3rd of November, in which people gathered on the #drupal IRC channel will focus on fixing bugs in the critical issue queue.

webchick, desbeers, dvessel, davidstrauss and myself will spend part or all of November 3 with one goal in mind: empty out the critical issue queue for Drupal 6. In case we reach this goal and we have more time, well, there are a number of noncritical bugs and an even bigger number of patches that need work. Come, join the fun on #drupal on irc.freenode.net [...]

A few hours ago, Raincity Studios also announced that they are organizing a (real life) event for the 31th of October, titled the Disguised Drupalist Debugging Day. The Raincity event involves snacks and lots of help even for people starting to get their feet wet in patch rolling.

At last but not least, people from the Netherlands organize their first DrupalJam event for the 16th of November, which additionally to hosting sessions also includes a translation sprint, which admittedly is not direct code getting into Drupal 6, but nonetheless a very good opportunity for people to test every corner of Drupal 6, while translating them, and at the same time using the localization tools heavily, giving them some boost.

Things seem to line up nicely, and seeing Drupal 6 getting more and more stable by the day is very gratifying. In related news, the Drupal 6 development version is so stable, Angie Byron (known to most as webchick) just started her blog site on this version.