Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative status update video, sprint from Sept 14th

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Gábor Hojtsy's picture

Its been a long time since a discussion or status update was posted for the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative, the main reason being that we've been all busy with mapping out the main issues on drupal.org and working on some of them to move forward. Drupalcon London was great in this sense, lots of new contributors came in and seen that there are countless ways to get involved and help. We've discussed and wireframed usability changes, proposed several API cleanup patches and worked on localization update module integration pre-requisites.

Multilingual sprint in Montreal and virtually

The next best, closely coming occasion to dive into our work is the sprint coming up next week, from September 14th to the 16th with "overflow" on the weekend up to the 18th. The in-person sprint is in Montreal (see more information in the original post), but virtual participation is more than welcome (please do not sign up for the in-person event if you will not be there, so we know our in-person capacity needs better). We'll have plenty of tasks, so if you cannot come in person, we'll be around on the #drupal-i18n IRC channel (see http://drupal.org/irc for more information).

Initiative status update

In London I did happen to present a status update of the initiative, that however ended up being misrecorded with no video attached to my session and the audio even cut off half way into my talk. People doing updates after me were even less fortunate. So to give you all an update on where things are and what are the main focus points of the initiative, I've redone my session and recorded a video at home. I've also reformulated it to be able to serve as a guide to our roadmap as well. The topics presented are a result of countless discussions with many talented individuals. As always, the work is in progress, so if you want to influence it, there is no better time to get involved!

Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative Update (Sept 5, 2011) from Gábor Hojtsy on Vimeo.

Comments

Files will be tricky

tsvenson's picture

Great update Gábor, really pleased with the progress being made.

The only real concern I have is when it comes to media (files) and how translations are going to be managed for them as I expect it to be quite complex and rather tricky to make an easy to use UI for it, especially when it comes to be able to reuse existing files.

D7 improves this a lot and the Media module is soon, hopefully, going to be able to finally provide the media management Drupal so desperately needs.

The challenges, as I see it, when it comes to multilingual support for media is going to be many due to that there are going to exist so many different use cases and needs. Below I have listed some questions/concerns from the top of my head.

  • Files needs to be handled as objects where meta data and translations are bundled with them.
  • Many media files are going to be in a specific language, but should be used on some or all translated pages, a song or music video for example.
  • Documents sometimes exists in only one or some of the content languages and default language versions should be used when no language specific version exists, or for example a drop down menu option to allow the user to select the version to access no matter what language the rest of the content is in.
  • How will bundled media content, such as title, caption, etc for photos be managed? If its a photo that is reused there should be an option to override this for the new content but not affect the original (unless the author has the right, but then how does that affect other places it is used).
  • How will embedded media be managed. In some cases the same photo will be used on some of the languages, but a different one needed for others. For example, a product in a store might look slightly different in some countries, but the same in several others.

There are many more use cases that needs to be identified when it comes to files. I think it is very important that more research is done about this. I also think it will be good to coordinate this with the media module developers.

My suggestion on how to tackle this is that media files are handled as objects where all the needed data, configuration, related content (such as texts for titles, captions and other fields) and languages are encapsulated withing this object. That would then allow it to both be integrated with the same translation workflow/features as for text content as well as make it easy to reuse/override existing files.

--
/thomas
T: @tsvenson | S: tsvenson.com

Thank god we have you to

Hadi Farnoud's picture

Thank god we have you to update guys like me who don't have time to read up all post to figure out what's going on

Thank you

Media module code sprint and multilingual

tsvenson's picture

There will be a Media module code sprint in Chicago September 24-28. The goals are to get a stable 1.0 release (feature freezed) and then focus on the 2.x branch. It is also to iron out a roadmap and other future needs.

I think it would be good if someone with good knowledge about the multilingual needs could participate in this sprint. Mainly to help making sure the Media module, and modules extending it, will be supporting current, and future, multilingual support in Drupal.

--
/thomas
T: @tsvenson | S: tsvenson.com

correct me if I am wrong, but

dqd's picture

correct me if I am wrong, but isn't that "object" you talk about already there and is called "entity" ?

entity for content

Gábor Hojtsy's picture

Yes, for content, its entities. For configuration, there are many modules using custom object types for configuration, like locale module itself, contact module, views, and on and on and on... We don't know how those are going to be encapsulated yet, so I'm referring to a more general "translatable object" term to cover those too.

Update post title

Jose Reyero's picture

Hey Gábor, I was trying to update the title so we don't get this "sprint coming up next week" every time someone posts a comment, but I can't (Ilegal choice, permissions I guess, never mind but could you do it?

done

Gábor Hojtsy's picture

Done.

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