Multilingual Site Development

Did you notice i18n moved to github for D7?

https://github.com/josereyero/i18n

Actually, it is ready for Drupal 7. Not an official release, but if you look at the info file on github, you'll see it's for D7, so at least you can start testing.

Rene

So i I tested the i18n module with D7 and the very basic functionality is not working properly. It does not separate the content based on the language. So on the front page, regardless of the user language selection, the content that is displayed is mixed. Now there is a module called language switcher that enables drupal 7 to separate the content based on the language but it has side effects on the content administration section. Say you are on the English front page, then you click on content -> filter by language (other than english) -> the result would: "no content available".

Any thoughts

As feedback for the community of people trying to have a Drupal 7 multilingual site up and running here is what I can say presently: It has basically been a very tedious and time consuming process to have the different modules and settings configurated to allow the multilingual feature to work half-way as it should. I have already posted some information about it which you may easily find if your search a little with the keywords Drupal 7 and multilingual site.

In a nutshell I'd say that basically most of the features are working (if you find the difficult way to setup everything in the best way which is not obvious at all IMHO) BUT there are some features which apparently simply aren't working at all and that is a pane in the a... :((

Biggest problems arise with the frontpage and the homepage as well as with the default main menu tabs in Bartik. Though I have been trying for days hundreds of several paths I simply could not find a proper solution. It's a pitty because most of the basic node translation features as well as the selective display of customized (menu) blocks can be made to work in a multilingual environment e.g. the content displays or not according to language tags. Unsolved problems are the correct display of the front and or homepage (depending if you use the inbuild /node page or the views frontpage module or say another customized views page for this sake). I get persistent problems with the menu tab which is always showing in all the languages (though this is working well with all the other "normal" nodes) and the nodes / content promoted to the (default) front page. I tried various walkarounds with views and front page modules but without any success so far.

Another really anoying issue is about the language of the administation interface (overlay) since it's changing back and forth because that is the only way I found to have one base language without language prefix in the URL. In other words I cannot have the menu stay in english and the rest working well. So I end up having a mix of languages in all over the administrative GUI and it's sometimes driving me nuts.

Besides so many features seems not to work at all and / or are not documented anywhere leaving nothing else than a trial and error game for days / weeks in a row. I did it and I am quite frustrated at this point because close to the goal I have to accept that the site will not work correctly until more work will be done from the devs. Probably I should participate and report back in terms of bug reports but frankly speaking it's quite difficult and time consuming in these very complex issues and I have already devoted so many days in "monkeying around" to try to find out how all this stuff is supposed to work... :/ For those interested a concrete example of something which is not working at all would be the translation tab you'll find in ... structure/menus/main menu. Same for the edit tab in the multilingual options. Or a last example would be in the blocks visibility settings features like language (vertical tab) 'make this block's title translatable' which is just a nice decoration. Indeed you have to create a (menu) block for every language and populate it manually with the set of node links because the translation of the title is simply not possible at present.

So it seems that though some very good multilingual features have been planed it's partly only a facade with nothing behind it until now. That's very sad and I do hope that it will change in a near future. (Hope dies at last we say here...) Quintessence of all is that if you are only looking for a way to translate node contents in a linked well organized fashion then this should be possible by now. If you need some menu (blocks) with titles which would change according to the selected language then forget it!! You can create blocks which appear only for a given language but you will have to populate them one by one manually and as said it won't work entirely with the inbuild main menu. Last but not least to have the visitors start on a multilingual frontpage were you could then simply switch the language for all items won't work correctly too so far. There will always remain a mix at some extend (even the language switch block can only be called language or the main menu only called 'Main menu'...)

If someone can prove me wrong about what I wrote then please do, I would be the happiest on earth!! :P
I don't want to close this post without saying that Drupal is a very good thing which offers thousands of possibilities and features thanks to many guys who have been working hard for it to be what it is today. And of course it's free so maybe I should not complain, I know... :S

In any case good luck with your multilingual site implementation. :D