Webology
If you’ve never created a multilingual site for a client before, it can seem like a daunting task. Even if you speak geek it’s still easy to get lost in a sea of code, strings, files and acronyms. Thankfully, Drupal 7 makes this task a little easier. In this article we decode the secrets to Developing a multilingual site in Drupal.
The first two items you need to become best friends with are internationalization (i18n) and localization (l10n). Internationalization and localization are means of adapting computer software to different languages and regional differences. Here’s how they’re broken down:
Internationalization is the process of designing a software application so that it can be adapted to various languages and regions without engineering changes. The application will give you the ability to replace your English content with German (or whatever language you want). In other words, internationalization gives you the framework to create your “About Us” page in 17 languages and then have them displayed to your site visitors according to their selected locale.
These days, the use of tablets and smart phones has become so prevalent that it’s hard to believe some people still used a dial-up modem 10 years ago (*shudders with horror). But despite all of the awesomeness that is now literally at our fingertips, the increasing use of smart devices has placed a div in the road to web design and development greatness: designing and developing websites and applications for more than just a PC.
For those of you who don’t live your lives inside the high-stakes realm known as web development, today marked Facebook’s annual f8 conference where CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced upcoming site changes and unveiled a wicked set of awesome new features.
These days, you can do virtually anything on your mobile device. If you’ve ever been standing in a crowd of people, heard one of the generic iPhone ringers go off and watched about 14 different people pull out their cell phone, then you know what I’m talking about. Nielsen estimates that there are over 160 million smartphone users in the US. 160+.million.people. All surfing the web, and all probably playing Angry Birds. And that number is only going to get bigger.
Last weekend, Facebook hosted its first ever Hacker Cup. In what will probably become known as the Olympics of hacking, the Facebook Hacker Cup is Facebook’s international coding competition that’s designed to weed out the creme de la creme of the coding elite. Their mission? To find solutions to the most difficult algorithmic coding challenges in three elimination rounds.
