Case Study: Blue Peak Fanatics for Drupal 7

Creating a website with community content is great, but what if some or all of your community doesn’t read or write English? It’s a big world, and only about 6% of it speaks English as a native language. Having multiple languages is not as simple as having users post content in whichever language they like. There are other things to consider, like navigation, date formatting, and help text. And what about having the same post available in multiple languages, and easily navigating between them? Once you start thinking about it in detail, there is a lot of ground to cover. Luckily, Drupal core and a few contributed modules have done a lot of that hard work for us so we can concentrate on building our community and content. In this series, we'll cover the two main concepts for multilingual sites: internationalization, often abbreviated i18n, and localization, often abbreviated l10n. Internationalization is the underlying structure that allows software to be adapted to different languages, and localization is the process of actually translating the software for use by a specific locale.

 

In this first lesson we'll kick things off with an overview of our case study with Blue Peak Fanatics, take a look at the site we're going to build, and discuss how we'll go about implementing the features we need.