Bilingual websites - the challenge and the solution
One of the most challenging problems to handle for the future eLiberatica website was the bilingual issue. We had to find the best way for providing all the information there in both English and Romanian.
Finally, I decided to use Drupal but I wasn’t satisfied with the internationalization modules provided.
Fortunately and unexpectedly, I got the most help dealing with this problem from Roberto Gerola, an Italian IT entrepreneur, developer and Open Source enthusiast. Roberto helped not only implementing his new Localizer module but also he fixed a lot of other things on eLiberatica. And all of this without asking me a single service, only by good will and a strong desire to help spreading FLOSS ideals.
Now, the website will have full bilingual syndications, taxonomy, latest news, news section and all facilities translated. We are expecting to launch it in a few weeks.
For all of you planning to develop a bilingual website or portal, I strongly recommend to try Localizer with Drupal. Is going to save you a lot of work.
Regarding Roberto, he is one of the few that I’m keeping under the section “special and very rare persons” that I know.
I checked out the eLiberatica and it seems like a well designed site and Localizer seems to work seamlessly from the user standpoint. I notice that the site doesn’t mention that it is running Drupal. What is your take on that? Do you think it’s useful for web developers to let their users know what software they’re running. As a user-developer, I find that information useful.
What other Drupal modules would you recommend?
Comment by Alex — January 10, 2008 @ 10:15 am
Hi Alex, thanks for the note.
We actually mentioned in our blogs and is not a secret we are using Drupal for eLiberatica. The considerate we didn’t mention on the site is the fact we don’t want to promote there a particular FLOSS solution (as far as eLiberatica is willing to promote FLOSS in general); on the other hand, we whished to present there information exclusively about the Conference.
as in your case.
If somebody is interested, he/she can send to the webmaster a mail and ask
Related to the modules, I would suggest you to check with Roberto Gerola (http://www.speedtech.it/about), he is a real expert, he developed localizer.
All my best, Lucian
Comment by Lucian Savluc — January 10, 2008 @ 12:11 pm