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).

There are big changes planned and in development for Drupal project translations. Make sure to read my Drupal Groups post if you are a Drupal translator or you would like to become one, but the current toolset scares you.

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.

While being overwhelmed with Drupal 6 and Google Summer of Code work, some of the contributed modules I maintain lack real progress. Although there are a few patches sitting in each (especially Comment RSS and Archive module), I don't have the quality time to properly bring them forward. Here are the modules I am seeking new maintainers for:

Cool modules:

• Archive module: This module was part of Drupal core in Drupal 4.7.x and before, but with Drupal 5 it is spin off to a contributed module. There were some timezone and permission issues, which made the module frustrating to maintain in Drupal core. The contributed module now fixes these issues, and it sports a better browsing widget. There are still quite a few issues standing to add the archive block back and to filter by node types for example. If you smell a 'views can do better' feeling here, you might be right. I think that this smaller, to-the-point module is better in what it does. Taken by Bryant Mairs.
• Comment RSS: As the name suggests, provides RSS feeds for comments. There is a steady flow of great patches and suggestions coming in, like only exposing feeds on nodes where comments are enabled, let administrators decide what type of feeds to expose and so on. This is a great module, and needs some love. Chris Cook was already very active in the issue queue, so after some short discussion, he took over the module.
• Filebrowser: Provides an FTP-like file browsing interface. I developed this for drupal.hu, where we used to have a custom subversion backed Drupal interface translation repository, this module providing the file browsing interface on top of it. It has highly customizable output already, but has issues which would push it farther away from being an FTP-like browser, and more like a site asset browser.
• S5 presentation player: Eric Meyer's S5 presentation tool is a very cool little piece of software, allowing you to do presentations by editing a simple HTML file. The S5 presentation player on the other hand allows you to export books (maintained with book module) to the S5 format on the fly, which allows you to have a node per slide, so people can comment on your slides, add related links to them, etc. You can even reuse sllides by adding one node to multiple books. If only the book outline feature could be a bit better, or a custom dynamic slide sorter would be developed for this module, Drupal would become a cool presentation editor right away. Currently the book interface is clunky which does not allow this module to fly. With some care it could be the de-facto drupalcon backend to instantly share Drupal presentations :) Greg Knaddison took this module!

Old stuff depreciated by views:

• Series is a little one-off module, which is definitely depreciated by views module, if you ask the lullabots :) It offers a listing of nodes under the same taxonomy term to inject into a node body. It is very specific functionality we developed for a site. There are feature suggestions to make it more versatile (which are kind of pointless given the views depreciation looming :). If noone jumps up to maintain this module, I will certainly end-of-life or at least orphan it. Orphaned it. Because it only has a 4.6 release, it will certainly die in itself soon.
• Taxonomy HTML is another scary little one-off module, which is definitely depreciated by views module, if you ask the lullabots :) It was originally written (by Moshe Weitzman) at the time when maybe ten contributed modules were available. It is not even released for Drupal 5.x, so I will certainly end-of-life it, unless someone quickly jumps in. Orphaned it. Better modules exist for the same task.

Phew. While the Drupal 6 feature freeze craze was getting closer and closer, in the meantime, I needed to take a few final exams and defend my thesis at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics (the fantastic photo of the informatics building courtesy of fotav.hu). Finally I graduated after eight years at the university, especially to the relief of my parents, who at times thought that I would never make it. This means that as of 22th of June, 2007, I have an MsC in Technical Informatics (this is the official name, although I'd rather call it an Informatics Engineer).

Lots of things changed since I have posted the last "conference entry", most notably that the FrOSCon Drupal paper submission deadlines were extended until the end of this month.

This year, FrOSCon will include a two day Drupal conference with two rooms for Drupal presentations and all day hacking. People like Gerhard Killesreiter, Károly Négyesi (aka chx), Robert Douglass, as well as several Google Summer of Code students will be there. I will do a presentation about the Drupal 6 language improvements, and being a core committer for Drupal 6, I am sure we can chat about important Drupal issues.

I am very grateful for the Drupal Association to sponsor my travel and accommodation costs, which enable me to visit the conference at the first place. Come and meet in Sankt Augustin! Make sure that you submit your session proposal for the Drupal track by July 1st!