I am not sure whether this is a good idea or not, but I would like to hear what others think.

Drupal is getting better all the time for building multilingual sites, in fact I think it is the best CMS on the market for doing this. Having a separate Multilingual Guide will help profile Drupal as a Multilingual CMS, and will also make it easier for people find to the information they need, as it is definitely not an easy task to build a well functioning Multilingual site, not even with Drupal.

Currently, most of the pages about multilingual related topics are located in Working with languages inside the Structure Guide. Putting these pages, as well as related tutorials, HowTos, etc. in their own Guide (on level with Administration, Structure, Theming etc.) would make them easier to locate, and in general give more visibility and weight to this topic.

Comments

LarsKramer’s picture

LarsKramer commented
Status: Active » Postponed

Setting this to "postponed" until we finish #635590: "Working with languages" docs need an update

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
she/her
Primary language English
commented

I think that making Multilingual be a top-level book is a reasonable idea.

arianek’s picture

arianek commented

Yep, agreed, sounds reasonable.

gábor hojtsy’s picture

gábor hojtsy
he/him
Primary language Hungarian
Location Hungary
commented

Sounds good to me :)

sylvain_a’s picture

sylvain_a commented

@jhodgdon, @arianek: I'm just wondering in advance, what does it imply technically? Is it just a matter of moving the whole trunk to the root of the book structure, or is there other implications?

Some other minor steps i'm thinking about:
- Editing the content of http://drupal.org/documentation to add a link
- Adding an alias to http://drupal.org/documentation/??????? (potential bikeshedding about its official name ; ) )

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
she/her
Primary language English
commented

Technically, all you have to do is go to http://drupal.org/node/324602, click on the Outline tab (or Edit, and go to the Book Outline section), and in the Book field, choose "create a new book".

If you don't have permissions to do that, Ariane or I or another docs admin can take care of it.

Then yes, the steps in #5 are good... We definitely need to add it to d.o/documentation -- it will need a short description for that page. And an alias is probably a good idea... may be d.o/documentation/language? That isn't taken yet. Were you planning to change the title to "multilingual guide"? Is it just about being multi-lingual or about languages in general (single-language sites that aren't English)?

webchick’s picture

webchick
she/they
Primary language English
Location Vancouver 🇨🇦
commented
Status: Postponed » Fixed
Issue tags: +D8MI, +montreal

Done:
- Moved drupal.org/documentation/multilingual to its own book, and gave it a nice path.
- Added Multilingual Guide to drupal.org/documentation

Yay! :D

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
she/her
Primary language English
commented

Um... Well my question still stands. It looks like this page/section is also about just working with a single-language site that doesn't happen to be English. Do we really want to call it "multilingual", and have the description on the Documentation landing page be:

How to translate Drupal's user interface and manage multilingual content.

A French Drupal site is not multilingual... if this guide tells me how to build that, then I don't think the guide should be called "multilingual". ?

sylvain_a’s picture

sylvain_a commented

@jhodgdon In my opinion, the main focus is on multilingual sites, which is the most common user case.

Technically, we could debate that any non-English Drupal website has to be minimally multilingual (not in content, but from a site builder perspective, which we are documenting here), if we follow the explanation made by Gabor Hojsty here. This may be the case in Drupal 8, but not right now.
http://drupal.org/node/1266318

But to tell you the truth, the focus of the issue was to put the guide on the main level. If a consensus is reached, i'm not opposed to updating the title, description and path. "Language" is an alternative. In any case, you would need editing privileges on drupal.org content itself, which is something I don't have.

jhodgdon’s picture

jhodgdon
she/her
Primary language English
commented

Point taken. :)

I just changed the description on http://drupal.org/documentation slightly to read:
How to build sites in other languages and multi-language sites.

I'm happy, anyone else? Happy to change it back or put in other text if that would be clearer.

webchick’s picture

webchick
she/they
Primary language English
Location Vancouver 🇨🇦
commented

That sounds fine to me. I just pulled the old text from thin air and didn't give a lot of thought to it. :) Thanks!

Automatically closed -- issue fixed for 2 weeks with no activity.