With the support of the Drupal Association, I traveled to Bonn this Thursday and played the tourist around the city that day. I have been to Cologne yesterday (have seen fantastic sights in both cities), and we ended the day with a nice dinner with people here for the conference and guys from the local user group. See some of Morten's pictures which are already up.

We also ended up at our hotel for some night drinks, and I actually met with some of the nice people I know well from the PHP community (from my previous deeper involvement with the PHP project). It turned out that I switched from the Drupal guys table to the eZ Publish table (lots of people staying in the same hotel). All-in all everybody is very nice, we mixed up quite well.

The conference is also going well, although there are lots of German talks, which some of us can't understand unfortunately. But this means we are progressing with core patches in the meantime, so if you have some pet issues, be sure to continue work on them.

Again, thanks for the Drupal Association for sponsoring the event, I would not be able to make it without their support! And special thanks to Robert Douglass, who had a very good sense of flawlessly organizing the Drupal presence so far.

To cater to the needs of multilanguage websites, Drupal and other content management systems should take into account the different uses of these sites and the unique content and interfaces they provide. For example, a search site where content will not be translated might need different languages in its interface, while a personal blog where posts are entered in different languages might need many different features.

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Although Drupal itself provides a central CVS repository for the Drupal core code and contributed projects management, it is well known that people use other tools for their own purposes. There were several ocassions, when private Subversion repositories were used to develop new core functionality (such as Forms API or the multilanguage changes coming up in Drupal 6). Some people also like using BZR to manage their own changes easily.

A very detailed introduction hit my web browser today though, explaining how can you manage and even upgrade your Drupal installation (including contributed modules) using Git, even keeping local modifications.

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Development Seed is one of the (as far as I see) lesser known Drupal solution providers, who mainly concentrate on intranets, mobile stuff, aggregation and all kinds of good causes to use Drupal for. They are working with smart people of whom some are well known in the community.

Dries Knapen just posted about the 200th registration for DrupalCon Barcelona:

We just had our 200th registrant signing up for DrupalCon Barcelona. This is great news, and I'm sure a lot of other people are planning on joining us as well.

Yes, that 200th registrant was me. I was struggling with my bank for more then a month to get my cards (including a virtual MasterCard, which allows me to pay online as securely as possible finally). Then I was away for a week on holiday, so just as I am back, I noticed I can be the 200th registrant which was a good spot to catch :) 

Last November, I started off Drupal.hu/English with the intention that more Hungarian contributors will join and share their experience with fellow English speaking Drupalers through that channel. As a matter of fact, people like to keep working around their own homes, so there was only one post from Tamás Amon apart from my continued posts. It was just time to acknowledge that the English Drupal.hu blog was carrying my thoughts, documenting my work and ideas, so it was evident to move it out of that place and make it my own blog (which I never had one myself before).

Dear Drupal interface translators!

Your valuable work helps Drupal to actual world domination, so we try to support you all ways possible to be able to more efficiently organize your time to translate Drupal projects (the Drupal core system itself, as well as contributed modules, themes and install profiles). Currently your work involves lots of manual steps and several "esoteric" tools.

Bryan Ruby points out that many open source content management systems are started to think about multilanguage support as a core building block recently. Drupal 6 is one of these systems, and although it does not come with complete internationalization and translation features, it goes a long way compared to Drupal 5. Jose A. Reyero pulled together a nice comparision table of the Drupal 5 and 6 core multilanguage features. As his table shows, right to left (RTL, eg. Arabic, Hebrew) language support is improved considerably. Now we know about each post being written in an RTL language or not, and we know whether the language used to present the page is RTL. All is left is complete theme coverage, so themes can be RTL-aware. Drupal 6 comes with automatic discovery of RTL CSS files, so a theme can easily support RTL styles.

Having a great website management system like Drupal that has built-in content translation tools is an achievement in itself. But content is not always born in Drupal, and it’s most certainly not translated in Drupal. This makes it necessary, particularly in the context of multilingual websites, for Drupal to support interfacing so it can link in with external translation tools and their translation workflows.