Book Image

Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites

By : Kristen Pol
Book Image

Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites

By: Kristen Pol

Overview of this book

Drupal is one of the most powerful and popular PHP Content Management Systems at the moment. By making your site multilingual, you are opening the door to a whole new user base, in as many countries as you like. Use the localization and internationalization features of Drupal 7 to automatically detect where your site users are visiting from and select the content appropriate to them. The world is your oyster!Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites guides you through the wild world of localization and internationalization with practical and real-world exercises that you can apply to your own website. You will go from theory to practice and acquire the skills you need to make a user-friendly Drupal 7 site that supports multiple languages.You will follow focused chapter exercises to add multiple-language support for your user interface, content, and various parts of your site's configuration such as system variables, menus, and blocks.The latter half of the book fills in the details with step-by-step exercises for localizing the interface, the content, and the configuration. Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites will give you the knowledge and the skills necessary to configure your site to support your language needs.
Table of Contents (13 chapters)

Theming and module development


Every Drupal site uses a theme (or two!). It can be a free core or contributed theme. You can buy one from a theme vendor, for example, topnotchthemes.com or themesnap.com. Or, you can get fancy and create your own! In this section, we'll look at some considerations for multilingual theming including RTL support and custom CSS.

Many developers create modules to handle custom site features. This section also briefly covers internationalization for custom modules, including using string functions for hard-coded and user-defined strings. To learn more about theme and module development, check out the Drupal 7 Themes book by Ric Shreves and the Drupal 7 Module Development book by Matt Butcher, Larry Garfield, John Wilkins, Matt Farina, Ken Rickard, and Greg Dunlap.

RTL support

If you plan to use a Right-to-Left (RTL) language such as Arabic or Hebrew, your theme must have RTL support for the site to display properly in that language. All Drupal core themes have this...