We've just had a fantastic sprint with people interested in bringing multilingual support forward in Montreal for almost a week in the middle of September. People (in no particular order) from Evolving Web, Whisky Echo Bravo, Koumbit, OpenConcept, xMac Info, psegno.it, Acquia, etc. all participated in a week of code writing, UX reviews and planning, documentation and architecture discussions.
We marked most of the issues that we've been working on with the D8MI and Montreal tags, and lots of issues were tagged with Montreal in the Entity translation module queue.
While some of this work is still ongoing, all-in-all I think we made progress on lots of important pieces and helped kickstart important work on usability and key underlying API changes at the same time as improving the documentation. I'd like to especially thank the Drupal Association and Acquia for sponsoring the event which made it possible to fly in contributors from Europe too. We had a great gathering of people and matching tasks for everybody to be productive and contribute lots to the effort!
To provide some more detailed highlights, we've made progress in several key areas:
- Several of the foreign language and multilingual documentation pages and sections have been worked on and we got a top spot among the top level Drupal Guides in the handbook with the Multilingual Drupal Guide added. This is a real testament to the increased multilingual awareness of the community.
- We did a deep review of practically all screens that are related to language on a Drupal site. These are too many to link, but we spent a huge amount of time figuring out multilingual installation, making language configuration more practical, making the language selection configuration use better defaults and dramatically improve the setup experience among other things. We looked at some involved pieces of the Localization Update module user interface, given that the module is slated for inclusion in core for Drupal 8.
- We looked at better workflow support for translations, and in fact worked on improving the user experience of the node admin listing page, adding search functionality there as well adding more translation information to support multilingual workflows better.
- For Drupal 8, we are planning to move to have an integrated field translation user interface in core. The closest to that is currently being provided by the Entity translation module, so there has been lots of bugfixes and even considerable UX discussions and improvements to the module. The most exciting for me was the integration of translation forms to the node form to take advantage of contrib features for nodes and provide a seamless translation experience. While a nicely working prototype was built for that in Montreal, it is not yet complete. Follow that work at http://drupal.org/node/1282018
- There was lots of cross-pollination work going on related to other ongoing big Drupal 8 initiatives to help the WSCCI initiative with introducing language contexts, improve field language developer experience and add entity level language handling.
- We did lots of lower level API work as well on our side to introduce a language selector FormAPI element, work on making it possible to use English as a first class language (also important for usability) and provide a CRUD API for locale source and translation strings among other things.
Thanks for the Notman House and McGill University for sprinting space, the Drupal Association for sponsoring the event and especially thanks to everybody for being there! See you in followups and in the issue queue!
(Code sprint photo curtesy of Evolving Web. See their summary post at http://evolvingweb.ca/story/drupalcamp-montreal-2011-wrap).
Comments
Thanks for coming
Gábor: A big thanks to you and plach for coming over and leading the sprint. A lot of us use Drupal and other open source tools every day and often forget about the attention to detail and creativity that the maintainers and developers bring to the project. Seeing (and participating) in the sprint was inspirational on many levels.