Use multiple domain names in combination with multiple languages

@moreonion,

You can use Domain Access with Translations module enabled. This way you can default a particular language to one domain... sort of like one-to-one mapping. When you add a language, you can specify how you want the language-specific pages to be displayed, i.e. whether you want to use path-prefix (eg. de.dummydomain.com), path-suffix (eg www.dummydomain.com/de) or whether you want to use a separate domain (eg. www.dummydomain.fr). In your case you want to select separate domain.

In additional, Translation Overview module gives you a wonderful "overview" of what content/node needs to be translated and what has been translated already, etc.

A good case-study to look at : http://drupal.org/Dahon-Folding-Bicycles

Hope this is a good start.

That's pretty easy. You make multiple settings.php files by setting up your sites directory like this

sites/
sites/all
sites/default/settings.php
sites/de/settings.php
sites/fr/settings.php

You install drupal via the default address (the .com) then set it up so you have locale or whatever to do the different site versions. Then you copy the settings.php file over to the de and fr site folder.

Open up one of the settings.php files and you should see text like this --

$conf = array(

'site_name' => 'My Drupal site',

'theme_default' => 'minnelli',

'anonymous' => 'Visitor',

This is indicating that you can override specific database settings at the settings.php level. SO, you point to the same exact DBs and have all the same content but then can tweak these settings to say locale = french or whatever it is. I'm not sure of the exact locale settings you'd need to setup but this is my guess.

You'll obviously need all the domains pointing to the same server root to do this.

Hope this gets you in the right direction

that's another way of doing things yes

you install drupal and configure database

1. now you should point all three domains to the same directory.
   • either use sites/default directory
   • or use symbolic links to map sites/domain.fr and sites/domain.de to sites/domain.com directory
2. configure settings.php to set default language base on the requested domain:
   
   <?php
       // settings.php
        $language = array(
         'language' => 'en',
         'name' => 'English',
           'native' => 'English',
         'direction' => 0,
            'enabled' => 1,
          'plurals' => 0,
          'formula' => '',
           'domain' => '',
            'prefix' => '',
            'weight' => 0,
           'javascript' => ''
      );

        if (false !== strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], '.fr')) {
          $language['language'] = 'fr';
          $language['name'] = 'French';
          $language['native'] = 'French';
        } else if (false !== strpos($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'], '.de')) {
           // so on...
        }

     $conf['language_default'] = (object) $language;
     
?>