The previous piece in my series covered the basic language features in Drupal 7, including setting up which languages are available. Merely adding a language to your site will not make Drupal do much though. The site "in that language" will still look entirely English. The reason for this is that Drupal works with English as the default interface language and will fall back on that each time you have no translation for something. Until you provide Drupal with translations, it will still be entirely English. While weaved into my Drupal 7 multilingual series, changes explained herein affect Drupal users on all Drupal versions. Let's see how obtaining and working with translations changed not so recently and how can you get most out of that on Drupal 7!

This is part one in a series of posts on the new multilingual features in Drupal 7 core and contrib. I was sadly not as involved in the core mutilingual work that I wanted to (was busy working on localize.drupal.org), so I need a refresher myself on some of the finer details of what is going on. Therefore my journey through the new features, which I thought would be useful for you dear readers too. Thankfully many bright folks picked up the work and drove a good bunch of new functionality in terms of multilingual support into the new version. Let's begin!

Drupal Developer Days is going to happen this year in Brussels in one month (4-6th of February, 2011). This theme of topical conferences on Drupal getting focus is very popular nowadays. Brussels had an executives meetup in October, Prague just had a designers event in November and this next one coming up is focused on development. While Drupal historically had a developer room at the FOSDEM conference, this year, the project hosts its own event nearby kicking off with a code sprint on Friday and full-on session program on the weekend.

I proposed two sessions: How to integrate the core Drupal 7 usability improvements with your module and Drupal's new localization infrastructure and where do you fit in. I think both are important topics. Drupal needs contributed modules and distributions to be top notch in terms of usability (even more so then core) and it needs localized interfaces and communities to help it spread in all kinds of cultures. While the first session is more coder oriented, the second will hold invaluable information for site builders and translators as well (while keeping module builders in the loop).

There are already almost 300 people signed up for this event, so it looks to be shaping up to be fun and busy again. If you are working with Drupal, do not pass the opportunity to get yourself integrated in the community. This event is great to get started or just keep it up. There are various reasons working on Open Source software is going to benefit your career.

Back in the day when I was a college student, I was participating in "technology roadshow" events around the country presenting Drupal to various people. At one occasion, I presented to primary school and high school teachers and surprisingly, one of the teachers from my old high school was there, interested in the topic. We explained with my co-presenter István Palócz, that Drupal is free (as in speech and in beer), and that they can just install that for their school (as István did at that time), and use as an intranet or their public facing site.