Building a co-lingual website - lessons learned from ireland.ie
2016 marks the centenary of the 1916 rising in Dublin, a pivotal year in Irish history, and is marked with a series of high-profile events commemorating the rising. ireland.ie is the official state website for the 1916 commemoration and runs on Drupal 7.
While English is the main language in Ireland, Irish [Gaeilge] is the first official language. A decision was taken to present both languages side by side wherever possible for the 1916 commemorations - including on the website. This session will focus on the unusual co-lingual [2 languages side-by-side] approach, and how Drupal made it possible. Rather than each language being handled independently and viewed one language at a time, we had to accomodate both languages side by side on both the front and back end.
What level of knowledge should attendees have before walking into your session
Attendees should have some experience in building at least basic Drupal websites. The session will be especially useful to users building multilingual sites or complex websites for cultural events.
What will your session accomplish and what will attendees walk away having learned
- When and why a co-lingual website is appropriate
- Challenges that this approach presents
- Illustrate how to handle a co-lingual presentation of content at front and back-end, using views as a key tool.
- Outline an approach to site-building that puts a high value on editorial experience, with judicious use of the paragraphs module.
- What we wish we'd done differently!
We'll also outline how these approaches have evolved in our use of Drupal 8.