We want something besides the default messaging for user forms in Drupal. They are still in English, but just custom to our application. Also, we don’t need to override all of them, just a few. And, we are using Drupal 6.

Dx

Drupal is set up to automatically translate form messaging. Using this mechanism, we can cleanly alter the messages to appear just as we would like them to appear. We create a custom language and set it as the default. We only make the few translations that we need and Drupal falls back on the default English for stuff we don’t translate.

To setup the custom language:

1. Make sure the Locale module is enabled and that you have permissions to use it (both to Administer Languages and for the Translate Interface)
2. Go to Site Configuration -> Languages -> Add Language
3. Open the Custom Language form
4. Fill in the form with something like:
   Language code: en-MySite
   Language name in English: MySite
   Native language name: MySite
   Path prefix: mysite (this is only a placeholder and won’t be needed later)
   Language domain: [blank]
   Direction: Left to right
5. Click the Add custom language
6. Go to Site Configuration -> Languages and choose en-MySite as the default language, click Save Configuration

To make the faux translations:

1. Go to Site Building -> Translate Interface -> Search
2. Search for a particular string by something it contains, say, “username”.
3. Find your string in the search results and click edit. Enter your translation and submit it.
4. Repeat for other strings as necessary.

Tx

So, we end up with a clean faux translation of the default strings into your application-specific copy.

SO, THIS IS A QUICK IMPRESSION.

What I liked:

• lots of flexibility in names and paths
• seemed like reliably tested code
• default directory structure leaves public in top level of project
• LOVED, absolutely LOVED that the project manager replied to my twitter instantly

What I disliked:

• does not ship with a full default directory structure (Rend fixes this, but still). Give me a suggestion and I can change it if the default doesn’t work for me
• minimal LDAP support (auth only). More is coming I know (its in the incubator), and I have a very specific need for it. I’m not going to hold it against ZF. But a guy’s gotta search when he wants to find people at work.
• documentation. A long list of anchors in a longer page? Really? Plus, where, exactly, are the 500 examples in 6 languages?
• there is a lot of typing. Maybe I was following the wrong tutorial but I have to tell the model that the $_POST['title'] should go into the title column when I insert the row? I feel like it could match those for me.
• mixed Camel_And_Deliminated variable names. This is a nitpicky thing, but typing an underscore followed by a capital letter is hard for my hands for some reason.
• error messaging. If I had used the framework before I would probably find the error messaging tight and focused. But, since I had not, it took a bit to figure out what was causing my errors. Probably a shortcoming in my brain architecture, but the errors didn’t seem obvious.
• Google support. This is out of Zend’s control I know, but I was searching and searching for zend tutorial, zend framework tutorial, zend connect to database, etc. and only found a couple of tutorials that were up-to-date and well written. One was Zend’s quickstart (which only has sqlite) and the other was here (which is the one I followed for db stuff).

So, there it is.