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International and multilingual Drupal sites |
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Written by Jim DeLaHunt
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Saturday, 22 November 2008 |
 I gave a presentation about " International and multilingual Drupal sites" to the Vancouver Drupal Users Group on November 20, 2008. Here are my slides. As part of the research for my paper, I set up a basic Drupal 6 site with UI strings and content translated into Japanese and English languages. I found that Drupal 6 has very good support for multilingual site hosting. However, there were some tricky aspects to installing the right modules and then setting up the system configuration. I summarise them here, but it's probably worth better documentation.
The talk covered the following points: - Why international and multilingual? Setting a business context for making sites international and multilingual. (See my "Web 2.0 goes to Babel: Multilingual websites and user-supplied content" for a more detailed treatment.) Examples of multlingual and international sites. Increasing number of languages supported on leading international sites. An exercise to count the languages used by the audience (2 languages for every 3 people in room). Business drivers and business questions for multilingual and international sites. Language-primary and geo-primary orientations.
- Multilingual site design issues: Site domain structure. Interlanguage navigation best practices. Search engine friendliness when multilingual. Multilingual URLs. Tagging content with language. Detecting user's location and language preference.
- Installing a multilingual Drupal site: The importance of starting with Drupal 6 and a clean install. Three necessary non-core modules to install. Confusing Drupal vocabulary. Adding languages. Four points of necessary system configuration. Drupal's language navigation.
- Translating content: Using a simple Drupal 6 demonstration site, demonstrated how to create a new content item, tag it with language, and then translate it.
- Q&A
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Last Updated ( Saturday, 22 November 2008 )
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