Is i18n usable with Drupal 6.4?

I sometimes asked myself the same question. Indeed, in my opinion, the problems lay in the basics of i18n: some translations are stored in nodes (content), some translations in strings (e.g. site information), some are duplicated into strings (some vocabulary, terms). The translation process with node content is obvious, with vocabulary and terms it is depending on the configuration of the vocabulary (same term with different translations or different terms as translations of each other) and with user input stored in strings (like site information), it is a well hidden feature, complicate to handle (indeed you have to know the internal names of the strings and to add some code to settings.php, ugly!) And with the latter, there are much problems.

For terms that are stored in strings (same term with different translations), you have to use the interface translation system. The translation client was designed to easily translate the user interface strings. But you can not translate the terms with this module! You have to search for a specific string in terms to translate this term, a very quick approach, bah!

The dependency of nodes is also a hidden feature: I expected to have a language neutral reference to nodes in the URL. If you have, for example, the nodes 4 (en), 5(de), 6(lv) as translations of each other, a URL like /en/tnode/5 or /en/tnode/6 would all lead to /en/node/4.

Indeed, the basics work (for node translation). But all other is not even alpha!

Despite the handful of reported bugs, I have been successful setting us a few multi-lingual sites in D6, using the i18n module. The majority of the problems that I experienced, were due to:

a) lack of proper documentation for the module, which explains the many options that are available, and how they interact with each other. This means that I've had to spend many unnecessary hours in anger and frustration, experimenting with settings, that once understood, are quite easy to configure and get working exactly as you wish. I also believe that the lack of documentation means that the module receives a lot more bug reports than it should, as people often just don't understand how the modules are supposed to function in the first place.

b) lack of proper planning by the users, as to how they want the multi-lingual features of the site to work. In the beginning, my lack of experience led me to start implementing translation features, for instance, without thinking them all the way through - ie., will every page have a translation, what should happen if the page does not have a translation, who should be translating, etc.

Up to now, you have posted only a single issue on i18n that does not have a complete answer. And you seemed to have waited 2 days . There are a lot of issues to be worked out on many things. Quick responses are not guaranteed.

There are many people who seem to have the module working. I am one and I am not a php programmer. Perhaps if you were more specific in your support requests, you could get more help. I don't know what is breaking for you.

Good luck.

Well, the thing is that i18n is an evolving project and more and more keeps being added to core. All of the things that you say work without i18n required the module before.

It's possible you're running into bugs because of this process. If you find anything that doesn't work, please do report it here. I know that people are working hard to make this idea work.

For me NO !
This module was declared too quickly as stable.

stable?? where did you find stable version?
this module is in beta..

You are right !
For me it should be still in dev status .

If you have a specific bug or problem to report, please open one. Just saying, "It doesn't work, it should be dev," doesn't help anyone solve the problems.

And not answering to specific issues does also not shed a good light on the maintainers. My first experiences let me think of not even alpha state of i18n, too (see http://drupal.org/node/302905 and http://drupal.org/node/300193 which have not been answered for about one resp. two weeks). And unless I don't get an answer I think that the module does not work and that it was not me that made a mistake!

The answer is no, and I think this issue should be made sticky, if that's possible.
In fact, I think it's unwise to call this a beta release--it really should be dev.

I had the same problems as you when I was trying to use i18n in June.
After a week of frustration, I decided to rely on core as much as possible. You can go pretty far with the following:
* Views (allows one to filter post based on current language);
* Duplicate blocks, using a PHP snippet in block visibility making it appear for only one language;
* Duplicate menus: I had a french and english menu, using block visibility settings to make each one appear where necessary;
* Duplicate taxonomies: added the french nodes to french vocabulary; this worked only since taxonomy was entirely controlled by the admin;

I couldn't get around the sometimes buggy i18n_variables, however. Alas, the variable site_frontpage is loaded before i18n_bootstrap, so i18n can't even change that properly, so I had to resort to writing some questionable code in a custom module.

Having said all this, the maintainers are talented people tackling a difficult problem. Drupal 6 core's excellent i18n features are based on this module, and its creator and maintainers deserve a lot of credit. There are probably unresolved architectural questions about how these features should be implemented in Drupal 6. If my time and talent allow, I hope to dive in and start sorting some of these things out in the coming weeks.

Thank you "evolvingweb" to share my opinion !

I would say that your frustrations back in June, while understandable and unfortunate, have nothing to do with whether i18n works with Drupal 6.4, since that would have been Drupal 6.2.

I have found the module to work on all the versions of Drupal 6. I do think that more documentation is needed post recent changes.

Again, I would say if you have bug/support requests, open them. I am sure that the developers will welcome your assistance. It helps to be as specific as possible about what you are trying to do and with what you are trying it.