Chapter 1. Multilingual Overview, Use Cases, and Modules

Drupal is a big system with lots of moving parts. What exactly does it mean to make a multilingual Drupal site? We certainly want to write content in languages other than English. We need blocks and menus to be smart enough so we can use them for different languages. What about Views? Sure, we want it smart too. What about Panels? Yes, of course! What about a seemingly random message string coming from a module we just installed? What about the Drupal UI itself? And so on and so forth.

As you can see, we have a lot of things that need configuring if we want a fully multilingual Drupal website. This book aims at showing you how to navigate through the myriad of modules, configuration settings, and sometimes not-so-intuitive methodologies to make it happen. The exercises in the book are hands-on and organized to give structure to your localization process.

But before we start our exercises and break into a sweat, we need to understand a few things. This chapter will give you an overview of what it means to build a multilingual site in Drupal 7. We will explore a number of issues and considerations when working with multiple languages, and check out some typical use cases. Then, we'll take a look at some terminology and the different parts of the multilingual Drupal puzzle, namely, interface, content, and configuration. The chapter concludes with a preview of the modules we'll use in the coming chapters.