Drupal Starshot blog: Drupal CMS 2.2: Multilingual, out of the box

Drupal CMS 2.2.0 is out, and this release is all about multilingual. Setting up a site to publish in multiple languages has always been possible in Drupal, but it was not easy. With 2.2, we've tackled the biggest pain points from the installer through to translating your Canvas pages.

Finding your language in the installer

The first thing you'll notice is the language selector in the installer. Instead of scrolling through a long select list, you can now start typing and search for your language.

It's a small change, but makes for a much better first impression.

Recipe config is now translated

Previously, if you installed Drupal CMS in another language, any configuration provided by recipes (such as content types, fields, views, even the dashboard) would still show up in English. 

Recipes can include translatable configuration and that is now translated along with the rest of the site.

The multilingual recipe

Adding a second language to a Drupal site involves a lot of steps: installing the right modules, configuring language detection, enabling translation for each content type and field, and making sure you haven't missed anything along the way. Most people figure this out through trial and error (and a fair amount of searching).

The new multilingual recipe takes care of most of this for you:

• Installs the required modules and applies the basic language settings
• Provides a multilingual setup checklist to guide you through the remaining steps
• Modifies the content translation settings page to make it more intuitive, including a 'Recommended setup' option that enables translation for the entities most commonly translated (node types, Canvas pages, menu links and taxonomy terms).

  

Translating Canvas pages

Canvas now fully supports translation and we're using Canvas Translate to provide the translation management within the canvas editor. You can translate any component on a page, and use the Canvas preview to see how the translated version will look before you publish it.

Using the bundled Canvas Translate AI module, you can also get AI-generated translations with one click: either for all components, or individually.

New multilingual demo

Drupal core has long shipped with the Umami multilingual demo, which has community contributed, cooked and photographed recipes. Umami will not be included in Drupal 12 anymore and it was in need of a design rethink and retooling with our new easy to use page building capabilities. This resulted in the new Dashi demo, which brings the same multilingual content to a customizable setup with Canvas page and content templates.

Try it out

Try it out by installing Drupal CMS 2.2.0!

1. Install DDEV
2. Run the following commands:

mkdir my-drupal-site && cd my-drupal-site
ddev config --project-type=drupal11 --docroot=web
ddev composer create-project drupal/cms
ddev launch