Drupal

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.

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.

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. 

I have been to REMIX 07 today, which was basically a rehash of some of the Microsoft MIX conference topics and presentations for a road show stop in Budapest, Hungary. Although I use much less Microsoft technology then I actually go to the conferences, I mostly enjoy going because it inspires me. I see cool new stuff which of course escalates into cool new stuff I would like to implement with my tool set.

One of the simple ideas that occurred to me today was about in-place interface translation editing. It is so common a request to ask for in-place editing tools for translations in Drupal. Just recently, Boris Mann posted a pointer to SLS, which aims to be a more generic solution for the problem (although I commented there why I don't think it fits Drupal well). Unfortunately we only know in t() that we are working with a localized string, so we could print a span or div with metadata to allow some jQuery to tap in and allow translation editing. Unfortunately in t(), we don't know whether we deal with output for email, SMS, watchdog logs and so on, where the extra div or span would look very unprofessional (in a text medium!). So that rules out the PHP way we could add an in-place translation widget (forget about introducing another wrapper, t() is wrapped deep enough).

Over the past few months I’ve been researching how TYPO3, Joomla, Plone, and Drupal currently support multilingual content. Since this work was in part supported by Development Seed, I happily accepted the request to guest blog some of my findings.

This year, for the first time, a big two day Drupal event is going to be organized in Sankt Augustin, Germany as part of the FrOSCon 2007 conference (25th-26th August, 2007). Robert Douglass has more to say on this on the dedicated Drupal group, looking for speakers and sponsors for the event. The call for papers deadline of FrOSCon is closing up, you only have one week to propose a session on Drupal (or any other FrOSCon fitting topic) for the conference! Update: The Drupal session submission deadline for FrOSCon was extended to 1st July!