Hi all -
We have a project on the go at Affinity Bridge that has as the next phase of our plan to implement multilanguage so that we can bring a German client into the project (which is currently English-only). I've been working on scoping and estimates for this phase of work, and I'm finding the more I learn the less I know. ;)
I've been focusing on how much the initial implementation will be, and how much adding each new language after that will be. And also some more extensive integration with SearchAPI/Solr which we've been using a lot lately, and which Katherine Bailey (katbailey) and Tom Nightingale (thegreat) have been working on developing (Tom's also been working on a different multilang site En/Fr with SearchAPI and has learned a lot about what's going on, so was filling me in).
The current estimate I'm working with is about 265 hours of work for implementing multilang, German translations, and creating a language filter on the SearchAPI/FacetAPI/Solr search. And I'm becoming less sure as I hear about some of the current issues and plans that this will be adequate especially depending on where things are a few months down the road.
But, on the other hand, it's possible that we can put a bunch of dev time into improving D7 multilang and its SearchAPI integration, especially if it will help get some additional features such as "if content does not exist in my language, show it to me in a default language, or whatever is available" if those are desirable for the greater community.
Anyway, I just wanted to get some feedback on what's going on in multilang since I haven't been very involved, whether there are any drastic changes upcoming that should make us want to wait on starting this work (such as the change to field level translation), and also whether you could see this work helping out in a greater sense with current goals.
Thanks in advance!
Comments
field translation
Field level translation is planned to be embraced a lot more in Drupal 8. Drupal 7 has both node translation (in core and helpers in i18n module) and field translation (API in core, UI in entity_translation module). The overall scope / size for your plan really depends on some details. Like whether you have webforms or panels and need them being translated (no support there yet). The use cases are so different that asking for an estimate on the size of a multilingual site is similar to asking for estimating a "community site". Well, needs definition.
Hi Gábor - thanks for the
Hi Gábor - thanks for the response!
The site is mostly not too complicated, apart from the SearchAPI + FacetAPI which I can only assume we'll need to put some extra legwork in to get translated. And also we're planning to keep contributing back the work on those modules, which will probably include some additions to the multilang abilities of SearchAPI. The only other thing is maybe Display Suite, but only our dev team will access that so I don't think it'll need translations.
Our client has also asked for functionality that would let a user select a "preferred language" for the site which would show preferentially (ie. higher rankings in the searches and views), and then also to set a fallback language for when content isn't available in that preferred language. My understanding is that this doesn't exist in D7 so it may be something we will attempt to build (unless it's totally insane to even try - we're hoping to get some upfront prototyping done before we make any promises, since it looks pretty tough!). EDIT: there's also some tabbed forms using Quicktabs, and geo (using Gmap/Location), and Media...
So at this initial point, I'm mostly worried about the actual content itself - and whether building it in the next few months with the current D7 i18n system will have any great risks as far as having to rebuild the multilang pieces over again. But it sounds like the major changes wouldn't come until D8...