toronto drupal user meetup 3.0

last night marked the 3rd monthly meeting of the toronto drupal users group. it was a bit smaller turnout than i had anticipated, although really we're still not very good about announcing the meetings anywhere (which will change).

in general, those of us who had made it out to the OSCMS summit did our best to provide a recap of the 3 days of madness there. while the official wrap-up probably covers it, i was interested in hearing some general impressions from the others that had been there. i tend to be pretty biased when it comes to assessing the strength and momentum of the drupal community ;)

the other thing that we spent a lot of time discussing - as a canadian based group many of whom work on national, government sponsored, bilingual projects - was multilingual sites in drupal. right now, consensus is the process is painful at best and even the most "elegant" solutions feel awkward. the ideas hatched were to try and promote multilingual support (beyond locale.module's interface translations) for all content in core - nodes, terms, profile data, etc. this has been discussed before and is typically met with concerns about performance hits (and general complications) for the vast majority of drupal sites that exist only in a single language. we also spent a fair bit of time discussing through some of the workflow issues that make multilingual sites such a challenge. an interesting approach that we tossed around would be to approach the problem similar to the node access system - in that there would be all the pieces in core to make multilingual sites (perhaps by adding language fields to the appropriate tables)... then modules could make use of this to implement various translation workflows, etc. obviously needs some more thinking... but there are enough people from the group interested in it, that i hope we can come up with some actual code! :)

next month's meeting - on March 21st - is slated to be a "show and tell" meeting. i might just shut up and watch for a change ;)