Last updated by gábor hojtsy on Thu, 2007-07-19 19:37
For Drupal 6 to be able to come out with some fundamental multilanguage support changes, reviews of some modifications and improvements are needed. There is not much time left until the code freeze, but we have a list of important issues and some possibly nice additions for you to look at. Lot of the groundwork material we developed is already in Drupal 6, which makes it possible to provide some cool user facing functionality. Now it is a good time to review the suggested changes, propose corrections and help Drupal 6 to rock in the multilanguage world.
What's already in Drupal 6? A new language subsystem which supports multiple text groups to store translations in (additionaly to the built in interface translation text group available before). There is built in support for language dependent paths and domains, right-to-left written text, with some of the themes already capable of displaying RTL pages out of the box (more to come). Interface translations are automatically imported from the file system when you install Drupal or you enable modules and themes. Posts on the site can have language associated with them, and there is a simple content translation module built into Drupal.
What is left to do? Well, the following:
Translating site settings
http://drupal.org/node/155381 - The absolute minimum to support site settings translations with a contributed module
Translating content types, user profile fields, etc.
http://drupal.org/node/155047 - Minimal object translation wrapper for content type, profile, aggregator, etc. translation
Themes still missing right-to-left display support
http://drupal.org/node/148084 - Pushbutton RTL styles
... - Garland and Minnelli RTL styles
More visible language support
http://drupal.org/node/154151 - Language-aware search
Usability improvements
http://drupal.org/node/52990 - Redoing the locale module translation web interface (see http://groups.drupal.org/node/3916)
... - Define and implement Drupal 6 translation packaging format, redesign interface translation workflow (this is done as part of Google SoC 2007)
Would be nice for multilanguage features, but probably not going to happen in Drupal 6
http://drupal.org/node/147041 or http://drupal.org/node/146033 - Two different approaches for built-in site settings translation
http://drupal.org/node/141461 - Translating any objects in Drupal (it has a good UI, but the performance is not acceptable yet)
http://drupal.org/node/141419 - Rework profile categories (has many advantages, for one being able to translate categories)
http://drupal.org/node/145164#comment-250759 - Refactor variable defaults
... - Eliminate t() from $link parameter of watchdog() calls