Last May 23, I attended the Drupal Japan Group meeting held in Endo Ward, Tokyo. This is the third meeting of the group for this year and I was fortunate to be given the chance to give a presentation about Internationalization and Localization using Drupal. The attendees were mostly Japanese so I had to do the presentation in Japanese.
For those who do not know yet, Drupal is an award-winning open-source Web Content-Management-Framework used in the websites of many major companies and organizations such as NASA, Yahoo, MIT, Harvard, IBM, Sony, and MisterAtMsis.com (Ok ok, this site is not that popular. yet!). Even the websites of US President Obama and Hillary Clinton are implemented using Drupal.
Before my presentation, Timm of Wagaya Co. Ltd. showcased one of his sites -- DrupalAce.com -- and explained the modules that his site uses. I was interested in the Cumulus module that he’s using to display the tags for the contents of his site.
For my presentation, I gave a demo on how to build a multilingual (e.g. Japanese-English) website using Drupal. I explained the modules that are needed to implement Interface Translation and Content Translation. I also discussed the usual configuration needed to enable proper linking of content translations as done in this site.
Internationalization and Localization are big topics and due to time constraints, I wasn't able to discuss other important translation issues (e.g. Menu Translation, Taxonomy Translation, Custom Module Translation etc.)
After the presentations , there was a free discussion and sharing of ideas regarding site development. The meeting room was reserved until 9pm so those who were able to stay continued the discussions. Food and drinks were ordered but I had to leave early so I wasn't able to join dinner with the group.
*For a detailed recap of the presentations, visit Tokyo meetup notes