Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.The DA website should really be available in different languages. I have done a lot of talking to a lot of people at all levels and everyone have practically said "Yes it should".
I've been having an ongoing discussion with webchick about this and how to proceed to make it happen.
However, the site is on D6 today, and before enabling multilingual on it, it needs to be upgraded to D7. I've filed #1496578: Upgrade a.d.o to Drupal 7 for that.
I've also talked with Neil Drumm regarding the work needed to upgrade the server, and he couldn't see any bigger problem for doing so either.
At DrupalCon Denver I also had the opportunity to speak with a representative from Lingotek and they are positive to get involved and support the needed work to upgrade and make multilingual work. Even better, they are also willing to sponsor with professional translations of future content.
I've also spoken with Gabor and the other involved in multilingual work for Drupal and they are all very excited about this.
However, in this process we should also do an overhaul of the structure and content on the DA site today to really make it shine and be better adapted to be available in multiple languages.
We will also need to decide what languages that will be available from the start.
Lets make this happen and get a d.o site officially available in other languages than English.
Comments
Comment #1
Gábor HojtsyI don't have resources to help with this, but it sounds like a very good idea.
Comment #2
jhodgdonjust clarifying that we have two "a.d.o" sites (also api.d.o) so changing issue title
Comment #3
jhodgdonapparently I cannot type
Comment #4
drummMarking as postponed for #1496578: Upgrade a.d.o to Drupal 7
Comment #5
drummComment #6
jredding CreditAttribution: jredding commentedI don't understand why association.drupal.org should be multi-lingual, can someone explain to me the community benefit of this, please?
I'd much prefer to spend our time and energy on making drupal.org multi-lingual and communicating to the world the benefits of the Drupal software in their own local language. People need to first understand Drupal before they need to understand the Association. Moreover all of the Association's current communication is solely in English thus even if our website was multi-lingual it would be of very little benefit on a day-to-day level.
I personally would be a bigger champion on making api.drupal.org multi-lingual than association.drupal.org. Are we focused on the right a.d.o?
Comment #7
tsvenson CreditAttribution: tsvenson commentedJacob, api.drupal.org is probably the only site that does not need translations. After all, if you don't understand English it will be quite difficult do code at all for Drupal.
In my opinion association.drupal.org actually is the best choice to start with:
Then, since DA's mission is to support the growth as well as fostering of Drupal, having the information available in other languages than English would make a big difference for that. Things like the community grants is one example of something that would make a big difference in developing Drupal countries.
English speaking countries all have very developed Drupal ecosystems and finding sponsoring for putting on shows like DrupalCamps are quite easy. Non English speaking and developing Drupal markets need much more help.
I talked with a lot of people at DrupalCon, including @webchick, about this and you are actually the first that are negative about this.
Sure, I would love to see more sites on the d.o infrastructure available in other languages than just English. But the first requirement will be that they need to be on D7 first, then decide what to translate and how. All the other sites will be much more complicated and it is quite unlikely it can happen this year even, while DA's site could be done in quite short time, definitely before Munich.
Comment #8
jredding CreditAttribution: jredding commentedI want to be clear - I'm not negative about multi-lingual, I want the focus to be on the right place. I would rather see focus on making drupal.org landing pages available in multiple-languages. Landing pages that explain what Drupal is, the benefits of Drupal, and how to download/use Drupal. Getting knowledge about Drupal into multiple-languages has an incredibly high value for our community compared to a.d.o.
I'd personally love to see the a.d.o site translated to numerous languages but I doubt we'll see any net benefit.
For comparison sake: Over the past full year, 151 languages were seen on a.d.o, compared to 537 on d.o. on a.d.o over 95% of the traffic was from browsers identifying as en. If we drill down into specific languages we see a large spread:
Japanese saw less than 50 people over the year visit a.d.o but over 152,000 visited drupal.org
Thai was less than 50 on a.d.o but over 130,000 on drupal.org
The Association already works with numerous developing countries through a multi-lingual local leader. For example the Japanese, Chinese, and Vietnamese communities all communicate directly in their local language and rarely use drupal.org (or a.d.o). However, we know each of the local community leaders and have communicated to them what the Association does. We can always increase and better our communication and a multi-lingual site would do that. However, these communities are not currently struggling with understanding the DA they are struggling with talking about drupal.org because it is only in English.
We would help our community more by focusing on making drupal.org multi-lingual. Let's use the time of our community translators wisely and have them focus on communicating the benefits of Drupal in local languages. If demand is higher in the future we can revisit a.d.o but as of now I don't see any net benefit of doing such an undertaking.
Comment #9
tsvenson CreditAttribution: tsvenson commentedYes, making d.o landing pages available in other languages would be great. However, as I pointed out it wont happen until the sites are on Drupal 7. Enabling multilingual support for the D6 version now used would only make the migration more complicated.
As mentioned above, association.drupal.org is much simpler to migrate to D7 and could therefor not only lead the way, but also give us valuable knowledge and experience when it comes to managing multilingual content.
Comparing statistics between d.o and ass.d.o is in my opinion not saying much. My UID on d.o is around 350k, while on association.d.o it is 1,798. In fact it took me more than a year to even discover that the site existed iirc. Since then a lot has changed, especially with DA.
DA is now much more visible, not just when it comes to DrupalCon. Just the last year a lot has happened and Drupal users are increasingly more aware of its existence and what it does.
A more interesting stat to look at is the memberships (both individual and organizations). I would be surprised if less that 80% of the members are from countries with English as 1st language.
Comment #10
drummI wouldn't say it is quick and simple to upgrade. It is more doable now that we aren't doing DrupalCon sales, but we still have membership and t-shirts to keep working well. It is one of the most simple Drupal.org sites, so it is one of the most straightforward.
Comment #11
tvn CreditAttribution: tvn commentedComment #12
B_manClosing due to inactivity, please re-open if there is movement here.