[translations] collectigng i18n use cases, and systems to learn from

[Gabor Hojtsy]

Hello World,

It is now official that I am going to attempt to write my diploma about Drupal 
Internationalization. I have confirmation from my university and my consultant 
there that I will work on Drupal i18n as my DIY project in this semester (10-17 
weeks) and then the semester coming after that, preparing my diploma. To make 
this diploma worthy, I need to do this *right* (and I also need to be somewhat 
self-focused, so that I can show that *I* have done significant work in the 
project, not just showing off with what the community produced). That said, I 
plan to go through

1.) deep evaluation of how some of the other systems do i18n,
2.) collecting use cases in which Drupal i18n could be used, and abstracting 
some common stuff out of these
3.) look into how the relevant parts of Drupal are built up (dirty details of 
parts possibly affected by i18n, without care about how an actual 
implementation would affect them)
4.) study of previous Drupal i18n efforts, including all modules providing such 
functionality and previous approaches of them
5.) higher level suggestions about possible implementation strategies
6.) once there is consensus, coordinate implementation of the actual approach

Once again, note that since I aim at this being my diploma topic, I need to do 
it according to the "school book" (which should help the Drupal i18n project be 
as throuroughly thought out and discussed as possible, but would take more time 
to get to the actual implementation). Also my need to produce results *myself* 
does not mean I should not work closely with the community. The above plan has 
several connections to the community, starting from collecting a list of i18n 
capable systems to study to getting use cases and discussing implementation 
strategies. I itend to do this 'in the open', so everyone can see what is going 
on, and can benefit from the progress.

I am also not starting this with a disconnect to existing work done (namely 
Jose and others contributing to the i18n.module), but since there were a lot of 
debate around the approach taken there, I would like to take a step back, and 
provide a solid base for the soon to be core code with actual use cases and 
existing system comparisions. It could turn out that the current i18n 
implementation stands still, or it could result in a better implementation. 
Time will tell.

I will have weekly meetings with my consultant at the university, who demands 
that I show up with some work done, so I'd better start and do what I can :) 
What you can do to help bring this forward first is to join the i18n group at 
groups.drupal.org and second to take part in any of the two community feedback 
requests I have put up.

I would like to start with collecting your input in two areas. First if you 
know of a system which is possible to set up 'at home' (ie. on a usual Windows 
or Linux server) and you already know of its good i18n capabilities (mostly 
content translation related features), please tell us about it. Second if you 
have some use case you already tried to use Drupal i18n in (or any other 
software with i18n capabilities for that matter), you could provide a use case.

  Suggest a system:   http://groups.drupal.org/node/1544
  Provide a use case: http://groups.drupal.org/node/1545
  What's i18n?        http://groups.drupal.org/node/1543
  The i18n group:     http://groups.drupal.org/i18n

I think it is better to comment on these nodes or add new nodes there in case 
of use case collection, but if you have anything pressing you need to 
ask/discuss/say here, just do so.

Gabor