Over the past year we saw two parallel community initiatives heavily influencing the development of Drupal 7: a huge effort in improving Drupal's usability that led to the introduction of solutions and features, radically changing the user experience in building sites with Drupal 7. At the same time, advancing on the direction taken with Drupal 6, many internationalization improvements were introduced in core and many more will be available through contributed modules.
Both initiatives were driven by key contributors of the community, to promote them and push them forward. Self-organized sprints were held both for UX and i18n improvements, which allowed people to know each other better, work together, drafting ideas, and participate in designing and developing ideal solutions.
As a natural consequence, we launched the Sabir proposal: a community-driven project which aims to produce a platform dedicated to communities with minimal technical expertise, allowing to easily share news in multiple languages.
If you have not already, we would appreciate if you showed your support for it.
Current status of development
Drupal 7 will ship with many new features that make building a possibly complex website easier, including:
- New administration theme
- Better navigation for administrative tasks
- Dashboard page for tracking information
- Contextual links
- Countless improvements and refinements of the existing user interface
On the i18n side we fixed many outstanding bugs and feature requests and introduced some new key features:
- Localized date formats
- New time zone handling, including daylight saving time adjustments
- Revamped language negotiation system to support more flexible and extensible configurations
- Preparation for "dynamic database translation" which will allow us to transate any user-entered string
- Framework for a new and powerful content translation system which will be available as a contributed module and will allow to translate any fieldable entity
Yet, there is still a lot of work to do. Many issues were postponed to Drupal 8 due to the lack of resources. Additionally, the youth of both initiatives did not allow us to always direct all efforts and make them fit into the general design. As a consequence, there are still UX and i18n areas in Drupal 7 that would benefit from the work of a skilled, coordinated, and focused team.
The Knight News Challenge opportunity
The Knight Foundation has launched the News Challenge contest in which media innovators are competing with ideas whose aim is to transform the way news are disseminated. Some of the most prominent members of the UX and i18n teams decided to join their forces to exploit this opportunity and to further push forward the results already obtained by the community.
We submitted an application, which already passed the first review of the Knight Foundation staff. On February 15th, we will know whether we reached the final stage, i.e. the proposals among which the winners will be chosen.
A brief excerpt, taken from our project description, of what we plan to do:
In communities around the world, online news sharing is tantalizing promise just out of reach. Community organizations and leaders are aware of the potential of modern communication tools but often lack the technical expertise to claim these tools - particularly where language barriers exist.
The timing has never been better to create an online toolset that grassroots communities can adopt and make their own. The Drupal content management system has matured to the point that it is ready to serve as a foundation to our project: we have assembled some of the brightest lights in the Drupal community – designers, usability experts, developers – to build a Drupal-based community news platform.
To tackle the problems we identified to easily setting up a complex multiligual news site, we will focus our improvement efforts on three key areas: user experience, internationalization, and ease of install and updating.
With a solid focus on ease of use, we will build a platform for communities with minimal technical expertise to easily share news in multiple languages.
We were also excited to hear that not just the Sabir project but also “In-text localize” news items with Semantic (RDFa) mark-up in Drupal, Media Coverage Mapper and several other Drupal related proposals entered the competition.
The role of the community
Our intention is to make the community take full advantage of the Sabir project - every line of code will be contributed back to Drupal core and related modules. Moreover, we will document our design process and make it publicly available, so other community initiatives will be able to benefit from it. We intend to design and develop entirely in the open for the entire duration of the project, intensively collaborating with all the interested members of the community to make Drupal even better.
