Drupal 6 Multi-Language

[BradleyT]

I need a few pages to have both English and French versions. Drupal 6 core has Locale and Content Translation available. Is that going to be good enough or will I need i18n?

The only reason I want to avoid i18n if possible is because it seems like when I look at the issues for most of the modules I use or want to use - i18n is always causing problems with those modules.

[ergophobe]

I wish I knew. I was looking into the same issue the other day and it made my head spin, so I decided to just try to get it done in English and think about translation (into French interestingly enough) later.

I hope I don't regret it. I wish I could help. sorry.

[justa]

I also wish I could help here, but we're only just beginning to scratch the surface of a multi-language sites ourselves.

I'd be interested in any lessons learned from the community of users here, and will be happy to share our experiences as we go through a similar process.

[ergophobe]

By the way, John Van Dyck's Pro Drupal Development book has a pretty extensive chapter on internationalization (about 30 pages).

He discusses the locale module, content translation module and the localization server module (a new one on me - [drupal.org...] But he doesn't specifically address the i18n module versus locale.

Probably the place to ask the question is in the drupal group devoted to Internationalization: [groups.drupal.org...]

Also, you may be pleased to see that it looks like they're really working on these issues for D7: [groups.drupal.org...]

[esllou]

I know this isn't really the answer you were looking for, but I messed around with both i18n and Localizer in drupal 5.x and decided the best solution for a comprehensive bilingual site was to go down the amazon route...separate sites joined by footer links.

I now have my site in EN, IT and ES versions and couldn't be happier: the amount of sleep I've saved myself not pulling my hair out with trying to translate everything with i18n/Localizer...especially menu items, edit screens, images, etc.

It's a "non-solution" that has solved all my problems.

[ergophobe]

Thanks for the advice.

So do you run off one code base and just have a unique theme and unique content for each language?

[esllou]

Totally separate db's too. I basically have three db's

mysiteEN
mysiteIT
mysiteES

I used to be in daily contact with the developer of the localizer module and I quickly got the site 97% translated off on db, but then hit enormous problems and the guy himself admitted "yeah, you can't really do that - it'll have to be in english only". In the end, the code was hacked to pieces and I realised the only solution was to separate the sites.

the negatives are there, for sure. When I update drupal versions, I have to do three of them but that's basically an hour's work.

[ergophobe]

An hour? Don't you just update the code once and then each DB? I guess maybe that does take an hour.

Anyway, I do the same - one code base for all sites, using the multi-site functionality, and then a separate DB for each site. I've seen mention of a multi-site manager that allows you to update them all in one go, but it's based on drush ("drupal shell") and it requires complete control of your dedicated server, which I don't have.

[BradleyT]

Hmm, would this work?

For each page, create two nodes (in my case I only need French on the canadian section /ca/ of our site) -
example.com/ca/en/node
example.com/ca/fr/node

Then you could create a French template that runs everything /ca/fr*. And when you enter the node content you'd just enter it all in French.

You wouldn't need to run multiple core installs and I can't think of a downside?

[ergophobe]

And then you would duplicate menus and blocks and everything and show based on the path?

I wonder if that's really such a savings over having one copy of drupal with two databases.

[BradleyT]

Well I guess I'm confused on how I get drupal to run at both example.com/ and example.com/ca/fr

I've done multi-site using sub directories but I wouldn't think a folder set up would handle multi-site but maybe I'm wrong.

[ergophobe]

I was thinking back to esllou's idea of having example.com and fr.example.com and running that as a multi-site install.

I've honestly only used multi-site for completely separate domains, but certainly you're right, once drupal is running on the root domain, you can't run a separate install (same codebase, different DB) on a subdir. Or at least not easily because by default drupal will interecept everything at example.com/*.

So you would need to have a rewrite that tells the example.com/ site *not* to rewrite example.com/ca/fr requests to example.com/index.php?q=blahbbbbbaaaaalh

[BradleyT]

Well I guess I'm confused on how I get drupal to run at both example.com/ and example.com/ca/fr

Actually we're now consulting with a guy whose really good at Drupal and we're going to go with two installs of Drupal. One at example.com (english only with no multi-language features) and one install at example.com/ca/ (multi-language) which will end up with URLs of example.com/ca/en/ and example.com/ca/fr/.

I don't know why I was confused on the issue. Just create the /ca/ folder and drop Drupal in there. Two backends is gonna kind of suck but that's actually what our current CMS has.

[BradleyT]

Well it turned out that it couldn't have been much simpler once some clear instructions were found.

[drupal.org...]

So far, no fancy tricks will be needed at all. Just using Locale and Content Translation from core!

[edited by: BradleyT at 7:42 pm (utc) on June 26, 2009]

[ergophobe]

Ha! Typical. sometimes drupal documentation reminds me of the Krishnamaurti (sp?) story.

A man is walking along with the Devil and they are watching sage who is walking and stooping and picking something up. The man asks the Devil what the sage is picking up.
"Pieces of the truth," the Devil says.
"Oh, that's bad news for you" the man replies.
"No, not really," says the Devil. "I plan to let him organize it."

Sorry... feeling tired and whimsical. Glad you found what you were looking for.