Drupal 8

The Drupal 8 multilingual team is really great in spreading know-how on the new things in the upcoming version, so we had our session (1h) and workshop (2h) recordings published and widely available. While we of course love our baby and can talk all day about it, who has hours when they just want to explore what is coming up? We just addressed that this week with the following.

1. New 2m22s introduction video with the key benefits

2. A quick summary of key benefits and an easy to skim features list

http://www.drupal8multilingual.org/#topbenefits lists the top 12 benefits and http://www.drupal8multilingual.org/features provides the more detailed information in an easy to skim text form. And yeah, that 1h session video if you have the time.

3. Easy to launch demo to try features out

Thanks to our work on the multilingual workshops for DrupalCons, BADCamp and DrupalCamps, we have a demo with sample content in 4 languages that you can try out in your browser for 30 minutes without any registration or local software install required thanks to simplytest.me.

4. Check out who voted with their feet already

Drupal 8 is not yet released, yet there are numerous live multilingual Drupal 8 sites helping with nature preservation, finding health professionals or concert tickets among other good uses. Now there is a handy list to review at http://www.drupal8multilingual.org/showcase.

If you like what you see, we still have guided workshops (those that last 2h). The next one is coming up right this Sunday at DrupalCamp Spain. We also believe that the multilingual team is one of the best to get involved with if you want to know Drupal 8 better and give back some to improve the new version as well. We have weekly meetings and a huge sprint coming up at DrupalCon Barcelona. Maybe we'll have some opportunity to celebrate as well. See you there!

Up to date as of October 29th, 2015.

In the introduction to content and configuration translation piece we discussed what is considered content in Drupal 8. This is a somewhat misleading term because custom blocks, custom menu items and even user entities (user profiles) are considered content in terms of their implementation.

Content is always stored as entities. The main difference between configuration and content entities is configuration is usually created on the backend (think views, vocabularies, etc.) while content is usually created on the frontend (think free tagging taxonomy terms, comments, blog posts). This is not a black and white differentiation but it helps think of the categories. The other key differentiator is content entities usually get to have configurable fields. You can add new fields to user profiles, taxonomy terms or comments. Again there are exceptions, for example custom menu items cannot get configurable fields in core. Finally, there are even content entities that will not be stored, in Drupal 8 contact form submissions are content entities that live only until they are sent via email. For this tidbit we are concerned for content entities that are stored and multilingual.

Whew! 2014 was a fantastic year for the Drupal multilingual team. We had some great events with huge sprints, including but not limited to: Global Sprint Weekend, the amazing Drupal Dev Days Europe, NYC Camp, DrupalCon Austin, DrupalCon Amsterdam and BADCamp.

A fun fact about people on the multilingual team is that even though we usually turn out in big numbers at sprints, there are numerous great mentors among us, so we don't work on code that much at mentored sprints. We do a great job helping people get started and move into more serious core work though. Our most famous mentee this past year is 2014th Drupal 8 core contributor Holly Ross, Executive Director of the Drupal Association who contributed her first and second core patches fixing multilingual issues.

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After over a month of concentrated work, Drupal 8 was ready today to finally flip the switch and enforce strict configuration schema adherence in all TestBase derived tests in core. See the announcement in the core group.

If you are a Drupal 8 contrib developer and provided some configuration schema earlier (or you integrate with an existing core system like blocks, views, fields, etc.) then your tests may now fail with configuration schema errors. Unless of course all your configuration schema is correct: #highfive for you then.

Otherwise I thought you'll have questions. There is of course the existing configuration schema documentation that I helped write. However if you are a visual person and want to get an understanding of the basics fast, I thought a cheat sheet would be a great tool. So sat down today and produced this one in the hopes it will help you all! Enjoy!

Please provide feedback for improvements in the comments, and I'll update the sheet as appropriate.

I just had the time to watch Larry Garfield's DrupalCon Amsterdam core conversation on managing complexity today. I did not have the chance to attend his session live due to other obligations, but it is nonetheless a topic I am very interested in.

The key point of the talk in my understanding is the Drupal community needs to decouple and be component based (evolving around more independent components), so responsibility and authority is distributed and local. Larry specifically calls out that Drupal 8 initiative leads and component maintainers are "glorified secretaries" with responsibility but no explicitly granted authority.

I am not a native speaker and although I had an idea, I wanted to clear up what authority would mean. According to Google the power or right to give orders, make decisions, and enforce obedience. (I'll use hard power as a synonym). Larry alludes to parts of this definition in the talk with examples. While the talk is well worth the hour to get insights form one of the Drupal 8 initiative leads on some of the struggles we had in the Drupal 8 cycle so far, I think there are fundamental issues with the premise. The biggest fallacy is the gross generalisation and picking one facet out of a very multi-faceted situation, so the proposed solutions don't stand deeper scrutiny.

Drupalaton 2014 was amazing. I got involved pretty late in the organization when we added sprinting capacity on all four days, but I must say doing that was well worth it. While the pre-planned schedule of the event focused on longer full day and half day workshops on business English, automation, rules, commerce, multilingual, etc. the sprint was thriving with backend developer luminaries such as Wim Leers, dawehner, fago, swentel, pfrennsen, dasjo as well as sizable frontend crew such as mortendk, lewisnyman, rteijeiro, emmamaria, etc. This setup allowed us to work on a very wide range of issues.

The list of 70+ issues we worked on shows our work on the drupal.org infrastructure, numerous frontend issues to clean up Drupal's markup, important performance problems, several release critical issues and significant work on all three non-postponed beta blockers at the time.

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Drupalers "shipped" from port to port; Photo by TCPhoto

Our coordinated timing with the TCDrupal sprints really helped in working on some of the same issues together. We successfully closed one of the beta blockers shortly after the sprint thanks to coordinated efforts between the two events.

Our list of issues also shows the success of the Rules training on the first day in bringing new people in to porting Rules components, as well as work on other important contributed modules: fixing issues with the Git deploy module's Drupal 8 port and work on the Drupal 8 version of CAPTCHA.

Thanks to the organizers, the sponsors of the event including the Drupal Association Community Cultivation Grants program for enabling us to have some of the most important Drupal developers work together on pressing issues, eat healthy and have fun on the way.

Ps. There is never a lack of opportunity to work with these amazing people. Several days of sprints are coming up around DrupalCon Amsterdam in a little over a month! The weekend sprint locations before/after the DrupalCon days are also really cool! See you there!

DrupalCon Amsterdam is coming up in just a few weeks and it is full of opportunities to learn about and get all your questions answered when it comes to multilingual Drupal. What's better, you can get involved making things happen and learn from those implementing the features firsthand. Here are my picks:

Multilingual Drupal 8 site building and programming

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• There is no excuse to not attend some of the sprints at and around DrupalCon. Sprints start two days ahead of the start of the conference on Saturday the week before. And there are still sprints going on the Sunday after the conference. It is not just the last day of DrupalCon itself where you can get involved and make a difference. In fact the leads are actually focusing more on the sprint on the weekend days. Also the weekend sprints are in a really cool venue. The best way to learn is to do!
• You are looking for more of a directed guide of Drupal 8 still with the possibility to do it all hands-on? Look no further than the Drupal 8 multilingual hands-on lab presented by Aimee Degnan of Hook42 and myself from Acquia. The schedule info is a bit misleading, this session spans two timeslots and lasts two hours. Bring your laptop with Drupal 8 freshly installed!
• Dive deeper into the APIs of Drupal 8! Francesco Placella from Tag1 presents Multilingual Content in D8: a Highly Evolved Permutated API showing how to code with the new system. While not strictly multilingual, in Field API is dead. Long live Entity Field API! swentel, yched and amateescu show how the most essential content element storage system changed and this is full of multilingual support of course.

Multilingual Drupal 7 site building and programming

• Multilingual Site Setup and Management is a half hour session from Robert Vandenberg and Rob Bailey of Lingotek back to back with Building a multilingual & multi-country e-commerce site for luxury brands another half hour talk from Arthur Murauskas of Adyax with real life examples.
• Dagmar Muth and Urs Bucher from Amazee Labs are presenting Building a Multilingual, Multidomain Drupal Site synthesizing their experience from multiple customers.
• I proposed the Multilingual therapy (questions and answers) BoF again! Waiting experienced folks as well as everyone with questions. You'll see even if you arrive with several questions, you can answer others! There is no set agenda, just to answer all the questions!

Moving localize.drupal.org forward

The localize.drupal.org site seriously needs people who care about it enough to devote time to maintaining and fixing bugs. I set up one more BoF to gather people interesting in the well-being of this site titled We love localize.drupal.org. We need to upgrade to Drupal 7, support the whole range of new Drupal 8 APIs, drastically improve performance and then get new features going.

These are all the multilingual pieces that I collected. There may still be more, BoF scheduling just started and I may have missed a session or two. Let us know in the comments what other great events happen around multilingual Drupal. See you in Amsterdam!

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!