[drupal-devel] Help with last push for Internationalization

[Jose A. Reyero]

Hi All,

I dont know if many of you are aware of our latest efforts to have
multilingual content in Drupal, currently focused in
Internationalization module (i18n). As I see it, from a business
perspective, multilingual content it is a badly needed feature for any
modern CMS, but usually forgotten in most of Open Source alternatives.
For an interesting read about this subject: http://drupal.org/node/29645

My  goal for this next Drupal 4.7, was being able to run i18n module
without patching. And though with latest developments in Drupal, and
some rework of the module,  less patches are needed, there's still an
important one left. And really, what makes the difference is not smaller
patches, but having to patch or not. I'm talking of this single patch,
still in queue: http://drupal.org/node/29030

This is also why this module is in kind of 'feature freeze' status. I'm
not for including more features, that would need more patching, then
putting away that goal of 'patch free' module, which is what is really
needed for more widespread addoption.

I know that applying a simple patch is not a big deal  for any
developer. But it is for most of end users, most of them just dont know
what a patch is, and I'm getting dozens of e-mails simply asking about
patches. Things get even worse when they need still another module with
patches, like taxonomy_access, which provides some incompatible patch,
then you have to apply it manually. And, in general, maintaining a
module with core patches is just exhausting, as they usually need to be
updated for any minor release or security fix.

So please, would you either support it -the pending patch-, propose a
better alternative, or just tell me you're not interested at all in
multilingual support in Drupal? As a reminder: http://drupal.org/node/29030

Thanks,

Jose A. Reyero