Posted by bisonbleu on March 15, 2012 at 4:08pm
Hello all,
I'm currently trying to build an i18n-ready installation profiles. One of them is for a simple Ubercart multilingual store. Not being a Drupal ninja or guru means I'm scavenging for all the help I can get. So as you can imagine, I'm looking for ways (examples are best) to 'Internationalize' profiles & distros. My goal is have a good-enough-to-go profile by the end of March.
I've searched through http://drupal.org/project/installation%20profiles but didn't find much. Any help, pointers or guidance would be much appreciated.
Cheers.
Comments
Have you looked at Open Atirum?
I suggest you start by looking at how Open Atrium handles l10n/i18n. It gets somewhat complicated, but then so are l10n/i18n in general.
Open Atrium not i18n ready
Thanks ergonlogic. I downloaded OA and had a look. OA supports localization through l10n (20 + languages). But as far as I can tell, it doesn't support multilingual setups. The i18n modules is nowhere to be found in the distro. No mention of it in the .make or .profile either.
Found this site while searching: http://drupaldistrowatch.com
Being. Knowing. Sharing. Ip Man
Then this might be of help:
Then this might be of help: http://drupal.org/project/multilingual_book_demo. It's the only up-to-date profile that appears to contain any significant i18n functionality (ref.). Note that it's very new though.
Also not that for UC, i18n gets very complicated.
Thanks for the
Thanks for the multilingual_book_demo reference. I'll have a look & see what I can learn from it (although it is for D7). As for Ubercart not being i18n-friendly, I've been through that hellish experience - I know how difficult (impossible) it is to setup a truly multilingual Ubercart store.
...
I'm now realizing that I need to break this monolithic task into smaller pieces and add more milestones between where I currently stand and the set goal (a methodology to i18nize an installation profile). In other words, the steps are simply too high for a manageable climb.
In the short term, I'll be concentrating on just creating a profile that allows me to install in French (and eventually any language). OpenAtrium seems to do that quite well.
Cheers
Being. Knowing. Sharing. Ip Man
Multilingual book demo
Hi! I'm the one writing the multilingual book demo install profile and it's meant to be used along with the book I wrote (that will be out in a couple weeks). Note that, although it includes the key Drupal 7 multilingual modules, it doesn't enable them so the user can enable them as they go through the exercises.
It sounds like you want to create a install profile that is used to create a multilingual site. I think that is a great idea and actually was something I thought about doing as well. But, it would be tricky to get right (without the user having to do any configuration).
Contact: https://www.hook42.com/contact
Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites: http://www.kristen.org/book
Re: Multilingual Sites Book Demo
Hi Kristen,
I did have a peak at Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites Book Demo Installation Profile. Although I didn't find what I was hoping for (a big red button that says 'Click here for a perfect multilingual installation profile'), such a book is long overdue.
I almost bought it but it's due out mid May 2012. I guess I'll have to wait... :-)
I'm pushing ahead with my work to build a profile that removes some of the arcane science required to setup a basic multilingual Drupal. When I have something decent, I'll share it with all its imperfections. Then we can all play with it.
p.s. great picture!
Being. Knowing. Sharing. Ip Man
Book discount
The book is in technical review so it should be out very soon... they told me early April. Note that if you did want to buy it and you preorder (or order) by April 27th then you can get a 30% discount using the DrupalCon code... see bottom of the sponsor page:
http://denver2012.drupal.org/offers-sponsors
And, thanks for the complement on the photo... I like that one too since it really shows my kids personalities off ;)
Cheers!
Kristen
Contact: https://www.hook42.com/contact
Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites: http://www.kristen.org/book
Multi-lingual sites leave a lot to be desired
I'm creating a distribution which allows possible multi-locale config.
At site install, I'll allow the admin to pick an install for a single locale (for example, United States), or for multiple (for example, "Europe", or "Worldwide"). If the site is single locale, users won't see any country/language selection, if the site is multi locale, they are allowed to pick country + language in their user profile. If I'm clever and get around to it, I'll also limit timezone selection (US people will only see Pacific/West/Central/Mountan/East).
Basically what this degenerates to is: pick the site language, and pick a list of "other" languages to support. If the list of "other" == zero, hide a bunch of stuff.
Content nodes created by the user will be created in the user's native locale, so we can search for specific locale-only stuff later (all nodes in German, for example). For some locales this may be the default (again, US people only see US content by default), with an option to see foreign nodes. For other locales (for example, Europe) we will default to showing a region of possibly multi-locale nodes. Users still need the option to see content from other locales - easily.
The saving grace to all this is at least I don't have to do content translation - just translation of the UI, which means installing a language pack, pretty easy.
What support do I get for all this with out of the box drupal?? Basically not much. I'm coding most of the features myself. I've also found fundamental limitations and outright bugs I've had to hack around (date picker, pathauto, more undiscovered I'm sure). The paradigm of D7 I18N is not well congealed. There is timezone, there is language, there is country, there are datetime formats - NONE of it really plays together tightly.
Just a simple example - when a guest comes to the website to sign up, I'd like to use HTML5 geolocation facilities to default all the above settings (lang/country/timezone). Sounds simple right? It would be really nice to have a switch built into core to do this, but I have to cobble together a solution from a bunch of separate modules.
Plus to get all the I18N niceness, you really need to be using the INTL module in PHP which is 5.3 only. So there are brain-dead issues like the fact that most shared hosting plans only have PHP 5.2!! Which means step #1 of getting my users to install the distro is to get a dedicated server plan or VPS hosting. Sigh.
I'm not (yet) doing ecommerce, so no multi-currency checkout, yadda. Good luck with that.
Drupal: a one-legged animal?
Hey aaronaverill, thanks for your thoughts on this.
In the last 3 years, I've come to the conclusion that if Drupal - which I like very much by the way (that's all I do, every day) - truly wants to be viable beyond the limits of the 'Roman Empire', it needs to be rebuilt on what I would loosely call an open-language framework.
In my humble and objective opinion, all the trouble that one encounters in the multilanguage realm is essentially born from the fact that Drupal is, as far as language is concerned, a one-legged animal. Growing more legs after it is born is, at best, awkward.
Under these circumstances, it's pretty amazing that Drupal was able to come this far, almost to the point of making us forget that, by design, it was never meant to speak more than one language at once. But thanks to a small group of heroes, the 'multilingual' illusion is pretty darn good and can deliver 80% of the bang for 20% of bucks.
21st century common sense dictates that one day we'll see a an open-source CMS built on an open-language framework. If it's not Drupal, then it will be something else.
Where there is a will, there's way - right? :-)
Being. Knowing. Sharing. Ip Man
D8MI
Fortunately, Drupal 8 is going to be much, much better dealing with languages than previous versions. You can help too by becoming involved in the Drupal 8 Multilingual Initiative (D8MI):
http://hojtsy.hu/d8mi
I was just in the D8MI sprint last weekend at DrupalCon. Good stuff is happening and we could use more help :)
Kristen
Contact: https://www.hook42.com/contact
Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites: http://www.kristen.org/book