Jose A Reyero led a session on handling multilingual sites and content with Drupal. He talked about some of Drupals current multilingual abilities and where its lacking.
As Jose presented, ultimately there are two options when developing multilingual websites.
- Separate websites, each with its own unique content, or
- One website serving content in multiple languages
The second option proposed is what Jose and many members of the drupal community seek to achieve.
Jose proposes that the following needs to be integrated into core:
- multilingual objects
- Language management (language definition using ISO language codes)
- Multilingual Variables
- Language aware Path System
So what are the next steps for us to take? As Jose sees them:
- Basic drupal Core Support for Language selection, and multilingual Variables
- Modules developed to better deliver multilingual content
- Language Aware Themes
- Language Packs to replace .po files
For more information on multilingualism and Drupal check out the i18n report.