Up to date as of October 29th, 2015.

We learned how configuration translation works on the conceptual level and through the Drupal 8 built-in user interfaces in the previous article of the series. In this article, we'll cover how can developers integrate with configuration translation.

Explaining the structure of configuration

We used your main site configuration file as an example in the previous article. Let's review that again (system.site.yml):

There are clearly some translatable elements here. Which ones? Well, at least the site name and slogan would be. How would Drupal know though? There is nothing in this file to tell Drupal about that. There is also no code in handling this configuration that needs to deal with that. We wanted to introduce language support in the most transparent way. Instead Drupal supports a static description format to describe the structure of configuration, that we call configuration schema.

Up to date as of October 29th, 2015.

After a long 8 months break in the article series, we are back to talk about configuration translation basics. Why the long break? Well, both the configuration and content system was in heavy development with changes and I did not want to get you content that would be quickly outdated. In the meantime Alex Pott also posted a great set of articles titled Principles of Configuration Management Part 1 and Part 2 which serves as great introductions. We’ll cover configuration translation first because that is more baked.

The Drupal 8 configuration system is a boon for language

As I wrote in the previous article in the series, configuration is now encompassing lots of settings that were variables or used custom settings storage in Drupal 7. The biggest value for non-English and multilingual sites in Drupal 8 of the configuration changes is that now a common system is used to manage your site name, email text settings through to views, field settings, entity form displays, etc. We can introduce language and translation support in a way that modules will need to plan with. It is not just an optional contributed add-on but a core feature.

Drupal is right in the middle of web technology, an ideal integrator of all kinds of things. Just like PHP itself it may be clunky here and there but it is a very efficient tool to build great experiences. And even if you are a great JS developer or a pro PHP person, maybe you have mad debugging skills, you always have something to learn. Now there are great books, sometimes even better videos, but nothing beats hands-on learning. When you get together with other people working on the same thing you learn so much about how they work and even if you gain no new knowledge about programming per say, you learn new tricks and ways to achieve things:

Two days working with the Drupal Community in #DrupalDevDays help you to learn more than one week working alone at home :)

— Javi Santos (@javisr) March 27, 2014

Not only that but you can also look into how the tools you work with are made and that all of us are human:

Greatest thing about code sprints: Hearing respected core devs say "I don't understand that." "Me neither." We all learn. #drupaldevdays

— Marc van Gend (@marcvangend) March 28, 2014

Finally, by helping to improve the tools you use, you gain much better knowledge about them. Close to the start of my web involvement I worked a lot on translating the PHP documentation to Hungarian and I got into Drupal fixing core issues for translations. By becoming one of the thousands building the system you use you also gain more credibility when you are looking for help in your weak areas as well:

after almost a decade of #drupal love i just became a real drupalist at #drupaldevdays - i am now a core contributor! http://t.co/VziKa9y7h9

— aboros (@hunaboros) March 27, 2014

But not everyone can do this right? You need to be a professional programmer and pay expensive fees to get into events? Wrong! So wrong! There are always sprints around the globe and more and more local Drupal events are announced every day. Starting out with a simple issue on a one day sprint is a great start. Drupal can always be improved in all kinds of ways whether that is accessibility testing, documentation, perfecting button colors and radiuses or finding and documenting bugs. All of those are great contributions.

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Drupal Dev Days sprint photo by Amazee Labs

The best places to immerse yourself in contribution are multi-day sprints though. If you have any opportunity to go to those, I would definitely suggest you join one. Why? It takes a fair bit of time to get set up, understand the issue, start providing a solution and even though at the end of the one day sprint, you will promise to get back to it a week later from home, it is almost certainly not going to happen. There is nothing wrong with you, you just have other priorities when you get out of sprint-mode. So for ideal involvement pick a multi-day sprint. It is not only that you have more time to work on things, you can get to know the people better as well on the social events. Some conferences, especially DrupalCons include extended sprints before/after the event. If you just go to the main conference days, you have much less chance to interact with people who shape the future of Drupal, while at the extended sprints, you can get involved and work with them real time. How is that for growing your potential?

Here are some examples of events with multi-day sprints where my friends from the multilingual initiative will be sprinting, feel free to add more in the comments:

DrupalCamp Spain in Valencia is coming up in a little over a week on May 16-18th. All three days have sprinting opportunities and some of the leaders from multilingual, frontend and migrations will be there!

Some people may only be aware of the Friday sprint at DrupalCons. Get a lot more out of the event by being involved with the pre and post sprints as well. DrupalCon Austin sprints last from as early as May 30 to as late as June 8th. Likewise DrupalCon Amsterdam sprints will be on from the 27th of September to as late as 5th of October. But DrupalCons are expensive, no? Well, there is no ticket needed to attend on the days when there is only sprinting, that is the pre/post sprint days and the Friday sprint. So if you join at the end, there is 3 days of consecutive working with the Drupal community for no charge where the people you interact with have no conflicting schedules to do or see sessions. How is that for hands-on experience?

Hope to see you at one of these events and other sprints in 2014 and onwards! Learn Drupal by getting involved, it is for the benefit of us all!

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The organizer team is still energized after our experience putting together Drupal Dev Days Europe 2014 in Szeged, Hungary between 24 and 30 March. 

Several people asked about details and we wanted to document the event for future event organizers to share what worked best for us. We prepared a report for you so if you experienced Drupal Dev Days Szeged, you can look behind the curtain a bit, or if you heard about it, you can see what we did to pull off an event like this. If you were not there and did not hear about it, we included several feedback references as well to give you an idea. 

Do you want to see tweets and articles like those about your event? Read the report for our tips! 

We definitely did not do everything right but we hope we can help people learn from the things we did right. Excuse us if the report is a bit too long, we attempted to pack useful information to every single sentence to make reading it worth your time. Send questions and comments to the team.

Did you expect to see how Drupal 8 improves multilingual tasks at NYC Camp? Well, bad luck! I'd like to apologise in place of the NYC Camp team for their messing up the schedule yesterday and their lack of communication following. I was told to set up for my presentation in a room that was not even meant to be a presentation room, let alone my presentation room, even though it was confirmed by several volunteers coming to the room. Later on yesterday, several people asked me why I did not show up for my session. I did.

The good news is that I delivered this talk before, and although the latest recorded copy is definitely not as up to date as the one I worked on for NYC Camp, you can watch it here (fast forward to 12:04 to the start of the presentation itself):

I would have loved to talk to you, bring you all the good news, answer your questions and hopefully inspire you to join our efforts. I did not get a chance this time. Hope to catch up with you sometime later at other events!

We are heading towards the first Drupal 8 beta and there are several opportunities to help fix your pet peeves, help round out the Drupal 8 Multilingual features and just explore what is there and find and reproduce bugs if you are not that deep into development even. The following events host sprints where well known names of some of the Drupal 8 Multilingual team will be present. Meet and join us there to help get Drupal 8 to release sooner!

As you may have heard, Drupal Dev Days is going back to DrupalCon Europe 2008's host town Szeged, Hungary on March 24th to 30th, 2014! This is the ideal place for Drupal Dev Days, a whole week of sprinting with learning and participation opportunities plenty on Drupal coding and all the related technologies involved. Here are five good reasons to register for this event now:

1. It is the biggest distraction-free sprint to work out remaining issues in Drupal 8 in the whole year. The sprint runs from Monday morning to Sunday night. Szeged wants to provide enough but also be out of your way to be awesome! For example, we booked the same venue up until midnight each day.
2. We believe it is essential for a successful core sprint to have core committers on location. Szeged will have Alex Pott and Nathaniel Catchpole with Angie Byron supporting from home while we sleep. If you are a core developer in any capacity, having these two great leads directly at the same place is an amazing opportunity.
3. Of course there is no requirement to be a core developer to attend! If you want to join the list of almost 1800 Drupal 8 developers though, Drupalize.me is flying in Joe Shindelar and Amber Himes to deliver the Community Tools Workshop to get you on board with all the tools and processes used in Drupal core and contributed module/theme development. Great new skill to have under your sleeves in 2014. There is not much hard about it once you get started.
4. We are taking the BADCamp/DrupalCon labs concept and provide options for speakers to deliver 2 hour and 4 hour long workshops for a fuller deep-dive on development topics. Even if you don't want to be a developer of Drupal itself in any capacity, there is a good chance that if you earn money with Drupal, you would benefit from some of these deep-dives. This is a unique format that other events don't offer. (Admittedly we are short on submitted sessions so far. If you, yourself would love to deliver such a deep-dive or a regular session, see http://szeged2014.drupaldays.org/program/sessions, submissions close on January 15th (in 12 days)!)
5. Szeged is a great cozy town! Many of those who have been there in 2008 asked us repeatedly to organise a come-back opportunity. Here it is and it only costs 30 EUR now! See our interview video on Szeged experiences at http://szeged2014.drupaldays.org/community/attendees. You won't regret coming.

With all these great reasons, what are you waiting for? Buy your ticket now at http://szeged2014.drupaldays.org/buy-your-ticket

Drupal 8 is coming up! Check out https://drupal.org/drupal-8.0 for all the goodness that is coming! While on the surface, a freshly installed Drupal 8 does not look all that different than Drupal 7 (the backend looks and the menus are similar), the underlying system is way more powerful and flexible. We turned flexibility up a notch in countless areas.

How best to get to know this new version? Well, there are blog posts and videos plenty as we get closer to Drupal 8 being more stable. I am writing an article series on multilingual improvements myself. We do know that some people learn great on a focused day of training though, so some of us decided to offer community training (read: really cheap!) before DrupalCamp Vienna on several Drupal 8 topics.

Along many other great trainings, on November 21st 2013, I'm doing an all day hands-on with Drupal 8's multilingual system including site building and some coding as well.

I'm really looking forward this training because I have seven years of experience commercially training people on HTML, Perl, PHP, XML, XSLT, Drupal, etc. and really love the work that is going into assembling materials and setting up a coherent system to teach capabilities and possibilities. I am also looking for this opportunity to find more Drupal 8 bugs (which I will both in preparation and we will as part of the training, I'm sure - Drupal 8 is not yet ready after all). This is a great opportunity to do some deep-dives into what changed in Drupal 8 and learn the new best practices.

I did presentations about Drupal 8 multilingual improvements at various camps and DrupalCons and the feedback was amazing. Someone wrote in Prague: Good session, maybe it would need a little bit more time or limit the content. Presentator felt little overconfident, but that may be just me. He certainly knows what he is talking about.. I cannot help the strong confidence, as I really think Drupal 8 is going to rock your socks off in terms of multilingual improvements. But this is the opportunity to have plenty time to explore all the changes and get to know in a way you would not have a chance for a long while at least.

Sign up for the training at https://2013.drupalcamp.at/trainings/tickets, it is just 50 EUR. See you there!

As people say, the best way to learn is by doing! Did you ever want to have a better multilingual solution in Drupal? Well, Drupal 8 is a big chance. While not everything will be perfect, it will be worlds apart from Drupal 7 in all the good ways. To quote some feedback from DrupalCon Prague: The work you have done for translations is a 'game changer' for the future of Drupal. and Can't wait to be able to use it on production!

The best way to get started is to help fix the remaining issues! You not only get to have your hands on the new features in Drupal 8 and learn the intricacies of them, but also get mentorship on how to build with them and also help Drupal 8 get out sooner and be a better solution. We also have a lot of fun! Full of win!

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Photo by Amazee Labs

To join in-person sprints, we have some options for you in the upcoming two months:

• First up is BADCamp where you can join the amazing YesCT, Schnitzel, Kristen Pol (also presenting about Drupal 7 and Drupal 8 multilingual solutions in sessions) and several other great people sprinting on making Drupal 8 multilingual. The sprint goes all the way from the 21st of October to the 29th.
• There are also camps on the 26th/27th weekend in Caceres, Spain and Essen, Germany. Note that these are non-English speaking events. There are multilingual team luminaries at each event, so look for people like penyaskito (presenting Drupal 8 multilingual goodness in Caceres), attrib (presenting the same in Essen), webflo, and others. Sprint space / time commitments at these events are not guaranteed.
• DrupalCamp Budapest is on the 16th and 17th of November in Hungary, with the second day purely reserved for sprints. This is a great opportunity for hungarian speakers to engage in some core work. Early arrival and leaving late on the sprint day helps to make a dent! I'll be there.
• I'll also be in full force at and after DrupalCamp Vienna in Austria. This is an English speaking international event. Given Vienna is an entities/fields stronghold, we'll get to work with fago, fubhy, yched, etc. The sprints run between the 24th and 26th of November. So far I'm the only one specifically signed up for the multilingual sprint there, so don't let me be lonely!

If you cannot make it to the in-person sprints, we are congregating in the #drupal-i18n IRC channel and have a meeting there every other Wednesday. See meeting dates/times on the front page of http://www.drupal8multilingual.org/.

I just presented a fully up to date version of my multilingual Drupal 8 talk this week at DrupalCon Prague to a packed audience of people sitting even on the floor to learn what is coming in Drupal 8. To quote one of the feedback posts I got: Great presentation of all the beautiful work that has been done for making multilanguage easier and more flexible in Drupal 8. Can't wait to be able to use it on production! Watch this talk to figure out why!