Drupal 6

Now as we are moving into supporting translation of site settings, content types and so on on the locale module interface, it gets extremely important to streamline the translation web interface provided. As far as I see, we have the following problems with the current interface:

• you are presented with a big search form, which you need to first understand to get something to translate
• search results are presented with "edit" links, so you need to click over to the editing screen for all values you need to translate
• on the "edit" page, you get input fields for all languages, but you are possibly interested in translating more strings to one language, not one string to more languages

As far as I see, the use case of translating as many string at once as possible to one language is much more common then translating strings one by one to multiple languages. Also with site settings, content types and so on translated on the locale interface, you are not actually interested in searching in them, but going through all of them, and translating as required.

So I would suggest we move to a direction similar to how watchog (now called dblog) works:

• you get an overview screen of values to translate with a pager
• this screen can be asked for in a particular language, and would show form fields and submit buttons on the bottom ("save translations", "save translations and continue to next page", "continue to next page"), the first going back to the localization overview, the second advancing to the next page with saving, the third only advancing to the next page
• simple filters would be shown on the top, refactored from the search form

How does this sound for you? What interface would you expect from Drupal 6 to translate several parts of the system? While I still would not tell anyone to translate the built-in Drupal interface with the web interface, admin defined strings have no other practical way (most admins will not have any interest in working with a gettext toolchain).

__UPDATE: Work continues on the wiki page set up for this project.

A modest proposal for this weekend's lesson.

One of the things mentioned by Dries in his "State of the Drupal" talk at OSCMS was how nice it would be if book.module would turn into a more generic outline functionality, rather than being semi-attached to a specific node type. I've had the same thought myself, and with the code-freeze for Drupal 6.0 coming up in June it's now or never to get new features in.

So I say lets do it. I'm willing to do the majority of the coding, and to package the whole experience into one or more dojo lessons. If others would like to contribute to the effort that's more than welcome. Does this sound like a good topic for at least one lesson?

This is the infamous "off by one error" that we see from daylight savings time, etc. I sat down and discussed this with KarenS and also briefly mentioned it to Dries about a good candidate for Drupal 6. Unfortunately, didn't have enough time to get it in as a Google Summer of Code project.

I'm going to try and explain this -- KarenS, please correct me if I'm wrong.