Hi Guys,
I am completely new to Drupal, and just started looking last night at Drupal 7 and various language related modules. I have an idea for a multi-language (2 language) site I would like to do, and was wondering if you guys could offer me some initial feed back on how achievable this may be with Drupal, and also how easy/difficult it may be.
I am looking at making a community driven site, which I would like to be in both English and Spanish. I don't mind manually going through and specifying the translations of the static elements of the site. However, with regards to the content I have difference requirements/desires. I would like every single article that is written to exist in the two languages. If somebody submits an article written in English, I would like the Spanish version of the article to exist by default. If the user (or another user) submits the translation then that's great, but if not, then the translated version of the content is provided by google translate, for example. When looking at an article I would also like it to be clear whether you are looking at the original article, an article translated by someone else, or a google translate translation.
Users will be required at signup to specify which is their preferred language. This will control how they then view the site. If they sign up as a spanish user, then only the Spanish version of the articles will be displayed to them. I don't want any users to see a list of articles that includes both the Spanish and English versions. Rather the article exists as 1 entity, but in 2 forms - the 2 langauges. The user will be able to choose to view the article in the other langauge, and also be able to easily change their language settings, but the site should not be littered with content from the 2 languages displayed at the same time.
So ... how does this sound? A nightmare to implement? Doable with a bit of work?
All thoughts and comments are much appreciated!
Comments
It is in Drupal 6, not 7, but
It is in Drupal 6, not 7, but we did both with the Train Like An Astronaut website: http://trainlikeanastronaut.org/
The front page has a stream of any new posts regardless of language.
But then all the "team" information, activities, nutrition, etc, are only in their language, not a mixture.
I believe multilingual has a way to go to be fully operational in 7, but in 6 it works great, and can definitely do what you want.
First impressions ...
Okay, so I'm a couple more hours into my look around Drupal 7 and it's multi language support now ... and things aren't looking great to be honest. I am repeatedly getting PHP errors appearing on pages when trying to access ceratin features from the various langauge/localization modules, I get informed that certain interfaces aren't available, that functionality isn't available due to bug x. I am reading through this guide http://hojtsy.hu/multilingual-drupal7 which looks useful and I still see many references to bug y and z.
Is drupal 7 still a pile of bugs? I'd be reluctant to invest lots of time in making a Drupal 6 site if it will then be surpassed by Drupal 7, but things are looking a bit tricky at the minute in version 7.
Any thoughts guys?
Drupal 7 is great and
Drupal 7 is great and dependable, but does not have the breadth of modules as Drupal 6, yet. It should, over time.
Gabor Hojtsy knows his stuff. He was responsible for most of the functionality for multilingual being in place today. He worked with us a couple of times on the http://trainlikeanastronaut.org site when we encountered a multilingual issues, and motivated an extra contributor or two to fix a few things we needed to work with i18n in their modules. So that being said, Drupal 6 has a certain "maturity" to its contributed modules that takes time to reach, and Drupal 7 is only 5 months out the gates right now.
Also, it is not uncommon for major sites to leapfrog versions, 5 --> 7, 6 --> 8, etc - so dont' worry about a Drupal 6 site becoming outdated too quickly. Usually two major versions are actively supported at once anyway.