Saturday, I’ve been at the Drupal Camp Montreal. It was my first presence is that kind of event and it was nice. Lots of geeks, nice meetings and interesting presentations. I have attended to “Tips & Tricks for Building a Multilingual Website with Drupal” presented by Suzanne Kennedy.
The localization client is my first discovery. It is Drupal module that adds a bar, displayed at the bottom, and helps you translate the terms of the current page. It performs the updates using AJAX. I have not tried it yet, but there is a screencast here. It looks a lot better then the default Drupal translation page.
Suzanne quickly talked about few planned improvements to Drupal core’s multilingual support. I was happy to hear the removal of the duplication of translated nodes. Instead, new tables will keep the translations of the variables, strings and fields. It is quite similar to “Globalize2“, a plugin we can use with Rails. Having worked with many different CMS, I’ve just realized how Drupal is superior to any others I know for building multilingual sites, even before the refactoring planned for version 7. With Drupal, it is easy and efficient to translate static content but also dynamic content.
I really appreciated my time at the camp. And more, I got the t-shirt! 
Congratulations to the organizers!
