 Okay, ladies and gentlemen, welcome along to this session building a calling your website lessons learned from Ireland at a So my name is Alan Burke one of the directors at our tech where Ireland's leading Drupal development company And this is a project. We worked with the department the arts urgent the guilt of here in Ireland to build a website commemorating the 1916 rising so 2016 is a big year for Ireland in that we were commemorating not celebrating commemorating The 1916 rising and you'll if you've been here for even more than a couple of days you'll spot different events being promoted different physical reminders Crackling a bit much Okay, we'll keep going and So, yeah, so we've worked with on this side for about the last 18 months or so It's still an ongoing development as the nature of the commemoration changes So we'll speak about what we learned about the calling your aspect of the website and during this talk And Obviously English is my first language and I speak rather fast if at any point I'm speaking too fast Or you'd like me to repeat anything at all. Please raise your hand and shout me down No problem whatsoever. There'll be plenty of time for questions at the end However, if you would like some clarification on some aspect during the presentation, that's just fine as well So what's very important for this presentation is context and I'm gonna probably spend a bit more talking about context and I possibly would for other presentations Because a lot of the things you'll see later on Questions will pop into your head is why did they do things like that? It doesn't seem like a simple way to do things or it seems overly complex Well, I want to talk a little bit about 1916 why it's a big deal at all in this country So basically this is not intended to be an accurate historical lecture It is not my intention to mislead to misinform or offend anyone in the room of any tradition In any way shape or form. So let's just keep that in mind before he started shouting me down with historical inaccuracies So basically our land has been afflicted by foreign occupations for a long time Depends how far back you want to go but basically we all started out here as Someone from another country. So indeed my own heritage would be a Norman heritage So I can't even claim to be native Irish myself But basically and as soon as there were occupations and invasions there was also rebellions and attempts by the native Irish in whatever shape that would appear to be to fight back against foreign occupations So there's been there have been rebellions. I did a little bit of research on this and there's been rebellions for you know I think this has been occupation has been rebellion But there's been big ones as in famously recalled and historically documented from as far back as 1534 1641 and then for definitely well-known dates in Irish history would be 1798 and 1916 itself and then indeed and spinning depending who you speak to there's still ongoing Rebellion in certain parts of the country, but we're not going to get into that today as much as maybe we could And an important aspect about the 1916 rebellion itself is that it wasn't actually particularly successful in and of itself So it's something that's slightly lost over in the history of the whole thing is that it didn't really do what it set out to do in the first place So, you know for a start it didn't achieve anything at all immediately The rebellion leaders were forced to surrender And they didn't regain any concessions or territory and tonight that that you might expect to gain from a rebellion however, what made 1916 Successful was the reaction by the I guess the the British authorities to the leaders of the rebellion So despite the fact that it didn't really have an awful lot of public support by the people at the time on the streets The leaders of the 1916 execute a rebellion were where in many cases executed And indeed you can go down to Kilmainham jail and see the scenes of those things And it was actually the public reaction to that that laid led to an increased Irish nationalism in various use that eventually led to Irish Independence in 1921 So it's with a bit of rose-tinted glasses that a lot of people look back in 1916 and I think that it was a very successful It did a great job and it did but it really it was only the the Reactions to it that helped it become a success But that said it's it's it's famously recalled and you know historically important within Ireland So when the when talk of the 1916 commemoration came around maybe two three years ago It it was it was unsure as to how it would be received within Ireland You know sometimes these things will depend on the popularity of the government of the day and things like that So the Irish government were unsure as to how exactly to treat this so eventually the decision was to take into treated as a commemoration not a celebration and The Irish public took relatively well to this concept And there's been a good groundswell of support in terms of locally organized activities and activity organized But lots of different organizations so The purpose of the 1916 project itself and the website that we delivered was more or less to act or at least initially Was more or less to act as a portal to other events that are going to take place throughout the country And that context is kind of important too. It was initially a visit This might not be a content heavy website This would be very much a presentation a brochure style website that wouldn't be really deep on content But we would point out to external partners who would be running the events who would have You know greater in-depth historical treatment of the various things that people would like to talk about So this was the original intention of the entire project as a whole but also of the website as a reflection of that So again the next slide here we go. So I want to talk about Irish So that's the Irish word for Irish gilge. So, you know Ireland and Irish, you know, there's obviously a long history there It's been it was the native language obviously for quite a long time but really suffered in terms of its I guess popularity and usage in the in the late 17th century and 18th century and the big event in Ireland that really Almost completely destroyed the Irish language was that the great famine of the mid 19th century So, um Irish was seen as very much a backward language a peasant language English was the administrative language and if you wanted to get anywhere ahead in life You really had to learn to use English or or be damned to a to a life without any You couldn't represent yourself publicly or anything like that and then on top of that you had a situation whereby Irish was actively forced out by the official authorities at the time as a language itself. It's not a it's not like English It's a Celtic language closest relatives will be languages like Scott's Gaelic Welch and Manx which is language on the Irish man on the Isle of Man Cornish and Bretonkin in northern France So it is it is itself quite different English and obviously, you know as languages go They have loan words from other languages and that kind of stuff and as an Irish public We're all expected. You have to learn Irish in school Up as far as your your final secondary school exams But it's a bizarre thing that most people leave school without really being able to speak or hold a conversation there It's taught as a subject and we're all Imposed or inflicted with various artifacts of Irish old poetry and novels and not a lot of people leave school with it with the love of the language But some people do and those people are very very very passionate about the language And that'll become very relevant to this website itself now, of course alongside that there are people use still use Irish as their first daily language That's predominantly on the West Coast and and various other pockets around the country where it's the first Language of everybody and it's used by everybody on a day-to-day basis So it's not dead, but it's definitely not the lingua franca So and you'd struggle if you walked around Dublin today and tried to get service through Irish and in various facilities And if you want to laugh you can have a look at a film called you being a Salam Dom It's a short film on YouTube But but a guy who decides to emigrate to Ireland finds out the official language is Ireland learns Irish arrives in Dublin and realizes that nobody speaks it So I encourage you to have a look at that one so It talked a little bit about Irish itself and why it's important on this site So this is a screenshot of a news item on the Irish National publisher RTE and it's November 2014 so this web so it's been through a few iterations and we haven't been involved in them all But one iteration and this was very much a very early iteration of the of the website It wasn't even on the Ireland data e-domain name at the time so the process that happened there was pretty typical for a lot of and a lot of website projects the developers who worked on the website and Didn't speak Irish themselves and weren't in a position to translate it So they put used Google translate just as placeholder text so they could you know finish off the website While the translations were going to be delivered by an external agency Unfortunately, they went live with some Google translate text not a whole pile of it You know, it wasn't like the entire thing was done in really poor Irish It was certain little sections But there was absolute foray over this by certain sections of people who have a vested interest in 1916 itself So what we found as we worked on this project is that we have a lot with a lot of stakeholders to deal with in this project In every project, you know, you have your client and they generally can tell you how things should be done and how things will be done And they'll you know, give you yes or no answers to how things they'd like to get done But the reality is in this project we had a lot more people to deal with and one if you if we saw the full Text of this you'll see that one of the people who were complaining about this most loudly Were representatives of the relatives of the people who died in 1916 so slightly and usually in at least an international context the relatives of the people who were executed in 1916 have this special place within the 1916 commemoration and their views hold a Lot of sway as to how things should be done So as well I happen to deal with sort of general members of the public and perhaps historians in an academic context Local authorities arts organizations who were going to be actually putting on events to commemorate this this this group of relatives Had to be catered to at every stage of the journey So while we would suggest things should be done in a certain way This wasn't always going to fly with an organization like that And obviously like the things I talked about here this entire project was a very politically sensitive topic and discussions and decisions were Often on a political level as to who what we could do that wouldn't offend anyone more than what might be the best thing to do and you know this this obviously provided challenges, but This gives an indication when we started getting involved we'd known about this This was obviously big news in in Ireland and we knew that whenever we started to get involved We'd have to get Translations right or at least we couldn't just think about it as an afterthought we had to say okay How are we going to deal with the translation issue at the very start? So again, I guess it's slightly a bit more context like how do people normally handle Multilingual implementation so I've used the word traditional because this is as much as you can say about tradition for a platform That's only been around for 20 years So there's a couple of different ways you can decide to approach language presentation So the first one is a very simple language switcher up there in the in the top right-hand corner So you develop your site. It's available at different URL paths And the URL path will help you will decide the the presentation of the site in different languages So it's a very simple switcher. You click on the language that you want on whatever page you're on It will present that language to you. Sorry present that content to you in that language So you can do like that where you've just got two languages or things get a bit more complex You can present the language switcher which I think at the last counter was almost 20 languages there on a site that we worked on and again This site and slightly unusual in that for a for all the languages It was extremely important that the language the site would only be available in that language So we couldn't have any fallback to English A fallback to English is going to become relevant when we talk about some of the aspects of this website as well But this was a for for the customer experience on this website It was extremely important that they would not accidentally see a string of English So often we used to work on a website where we see translations And if there's a couple of strings of English and you say Germans their first language You're not gonna be overly offended or put off by maybe a slight headline or some footer text in another language As long as you can get through the content that you require in your own language You'll be happy enough, but this that was a definite no-no on this site And we'll talk about what we could and could not get away with on the Ireland on the east side So another way you can off augment language choices by the use of flags So this is a local authority website here in Ireland Not developed by Anartek But the developers have chosen to use flags to represent the choice of language now flags at the best of times are Problematic in terms of how you would choose to represent a language So it's especially problematic in Ireland that the Union Jack the flag of the United Kingdom Is used to represent English despite the fact that within the context of Ireland I speak English, but I'm not from the United Kingdom Similarly despite the fact that I might see myself as Irish Irish the Irish language would necessarily be the first language I choose to browse a website. I speak it relatively fluently, but if it's available in English, I'm gonna I'm gonna read it in English And so this is a problem, you know, I think a lot of people who build websites who you know Haven't been haven't been exposed to the problems of flags Used as a language switcher. This is a good example and I'm really surprised that it's still there But you know, you couldn't build a website for the Swiss market by using the language the flags of France Germany Italy and The Romantic region to represent the choice of languages on the site So I think that's something that people say all I want to fly chooser It isn't the way to go and certainly not for a site in this context And another way to do it is to let the browser decide So what we have here is these are the hated TP headers that the browser sent in a request to the server So what I've changed my settings on on chromium as that happens to say my first language is German And if you've got your content available in German send it to me in German. So the website responds Sending the content in as much translation as got available in German. It's not quite a full translation They could have done a bit more with the cookie message and I especially like the translation of this site Uses cookies has been translated to I would like some cookies But but but nonetheless the most important parts of the of the site are available in German And I can navigate the site and use the site in the language that I have chosen in my browser This is all done before I ever visit the site at all the browser says to the server Hey, I want German the server says great here. Have some German But what's interesting about all these are they're all they're all a single choice So we in every single instance we looked at so far. It said send me one language and one language only I can read others in this case, but I really only will see one language at a time So, you know in our head, that's how we thought we'd look at this website we did we do it with one language at a time and You know, we've done some examples there We've done plenty of websites where we've done one language at a time and that's fine We know how to solve that problem however given the ferrari over the treatment of Irish in initial iteration of the website and Certain other interest groups seeing Irish has been very important for this particular Commemoration a decision was taken at a project level not just at a website level at a project level To as much as possible treat Irish as it is treated in the Irish Constitution So Irish is the first official language of Ireland and English as a second official language And you have a right as a citizen to have every single service available to you in Irish So the the website was seen as well, you know, we're talking about the Constitution now That's not a constitutional thing, but if not constitution the Proclamation was an important document as part of the 1916 rising and it would talk to about equality and things like that as well So it decided that we should try and embrace that as much as possible and make sure that everything every piece of material about this Commemoration was available in both languages in both languages fully So how are we going to do that? So what we did though is we looked at a couple of different approaches Again, I talked about the context of where this website was seen as is essentially just a brochure where website It wouldn't have a whole pile of content It would be something that would be seen as a portal to point people to different websites where more information about Historical events more information about current events and commemorations more events about permanent reminders or permanent exhibitions That we're going to be part of this so it wasn't seen to be this really really content deep site That was the initial I guess brief or how we envisaged site would would play out at the start now that did evolve over time But I want to look at how we treated the different languages as we as we present them on the site So some of it was fairly straightforward. We took both languages and placed them one on top of the other different colors used in most cases to represent the different languages and You know that looks pretty good. It's not going to scale beyond You know two languages really it'll just about scale to two to be to be honest a Certain amount of iconography use which I know has going to have some sort of accessibility potential issues to represent things rather than sticking with just a Single language there So it's that's basically one language on top of another the logo very carefully left out any words at all Just took what numbers? And Yeah, so there's more examples of another sort of item of content with you know English and top and Irish on the bottom So we'd obviously other pieces of content longer piece of text where we went for side-by-side And again obviously for those you ask well, you know, how are you going to do that on mobile? Well, you had to be pragmatic and put one language on top on a mobile device So if you look at that particular page on a mobile device It'll represent the languages top to bottom and we've got enough screen width Let me use the two-column approach and then we have some more top to bottom. Oh, sorry I don't want to what I want to do here is this is actually a slow little video I don't know if that's visible to everyone You should see the mouse moving in and on the hover we get the Irish version of the of a little bit of a microcopy there So that that seems okay. We're like, okay That's one way to treat it. You know have both languages available on the site initially We had a reversed it was Irish first and then English on top, but that got changed and then that grew legs And we started having a scenario where we had a lot of content in English with the Irish content revealed in the hover state So this wasn't We weren't overly happy with this We didn't feel that this stuck entirely true to the notion of treating both languages equally You know if you look at the site and you don't you don't Interact with it using a hover state You don't get to see the Irish and obviously that problem exists on the mobile device as well So the other problem at least it doesn't animate by itself So you choose when to move the mouse So you're not gonna have a situation where you're halfway through reading something and the animation kicks in and it drives away So I think that was one suggestion that we knocked back but so we did this and we thought we'd do it for a Small number of elements and it's got its problems. We're not overly happy with it But it's there and it looks nice if nothing else and that's always important So we're gonna talk about some of the challenges that we had and the first one is this assumptions a content length So the idea behind this website and indeed the project was that we never thought I can't say this off enough We never thought we'd have an awful lot of content So again, if you don't have too much content You're gonna have the time and you can get the resources in to craft content length to match So that when you present the both languages together, they won't look radically different and this this makes sense whereby You only see yourself as a placeholder and the most of the ongoing content updates are gonna happen elsewhere So you're not going to be under time pressure to get content length right and craft content to fit in the spaces available Now you could argue that maybe a different design decision should have been chosen to do these things But again, we you know, it was felt that no, this is all manageable We're gonna have the time to craft these things to get the lengths right But of course the project itself and the 1916 commemoration itself definitely grew in public popularity There was more resources available to put on a lot more events and suddenly this website had an awful lot more content That was ever envisaged if you look at the original brochure that was put together to commemorate this event It's a hell of a lot lighter and smaller than what what the content is on the website now So, you know, this is a good thing We're obviously doing a good job with the website and a lot of people are using it a lot of the different partners Who are pulling out events always want to make sure that their content was promoted on this website as well So, you know, sometimes it works really well. We can sit down and we can write really nice phrases and it looks, you know Equally presented on the website And sometimes it doesn't so different events have nice long titles and Other one even longer here The problem is that in order to fit that within the design We had to go for a strategy of content management called truncation And I think Karen McGrane says that truncation is not a content strategy So this was the best that we could do given the time that we had available You know have a complete real worker the design wasn't going to be an option But so this was the approach that we took so this this isn't really doing the job of presenting both languages together In in an equal sense. So this is an issue I mean the only way to solve it would be to go back to your drawing board design wise It can open a different way to present these things And because the the volume of content had reached the point where We weren't going to be able to you know roll the clock back and say on I know we're gonna spend time reworking the Titles on all these elements here. That's just not going to be an option Another probably we had was keeping translations timely. So a lot of events were put together and English content was a made available. Sorry made available to the website publishers or the various editors on the website however the Keeping again, let's do the volume increase more volume than we'd expected and therefore keeping translations timely proved especially difficult So what that meant was a very very undesirable scenario whereby we have placeholder text whereby the That line basically translates as the Irish text is coming Yeah, not ideal, but you know Sometimes you have to be pragmatic and go is it better to put up something or is it better to put up nothing? And the decision was taken we better put something up there because otherwise it's not there at all And you know this this definitely was not is not well received by people who would like to see the Irish language treated in an Equal manner because it's evidently not been treated in equal manner here But look this is the word the real world needs decisions that are taken without having real world content and in this case I was probably a bit more sympathetic than it would normally be to a client because A lot of this stuff you just couldn't envisage. No one really knew exactly how this thing would play out in a lot of context People can tell you if you know honest answers as to the availability of translation resources within an organization And you can make decisions based on that This was a bit more where they genuinely didn't know how things were gonna play out and this kind of stuff wasn't envisaged So I'm gonna cut the client some slack there Another problem we had then arose as again to do the volume way to do with external translations So again, it was always envisaged that the translators would work in-house within the Department of the arts urgent in the Guilford And they would have no problem keeping translations up to date But the volume went way beyond that the resources weren't available internally So we had to come up with a way to deal with external translations Now I'll talk about some of the things the decisions we made and what we got wrong But in terms of how we had to deal with external translations Some of the development decisions meant that at a short notice our only approach was to write a custom XML export And make that available to the translation Organization who would then work on it and provide an XML export that we could pull back into the website So it worked very well from a technology perspective We could get translations updated on the website using that resource They didn't have to deal with in-house resources to get them up to date However, it's not something that we had envisaged at the very start and therefore the experience isn't ideal Neither from a developer experience in terms of producing that work or even from a workflow from a publisher It's it's definitely suboptimal, but you have to come up with solutions to match the deadlines that you're given Okay, so we did a bit of work on the editorial experience again We wanted the editors to be able to use this site and Add the content of both languages in a visually equivalent way for want of a better phrase So we sat down with that. Okay. How can we do this? So we had a look at Drupal side-by-side translation Modules and we couldn't really get anything to fit in with the stuff that we were working with so in the end We actually went back to basics And we have a very simple implementation whereby we have different fields available which describe the different language options available so this wouldn't be I suppose the most Developer pure implementation of a multilingual approach, however from an editor perspective, they were delighted They were like, okay, great. I can put in the Irish and put in the English I had I can get an idea of how long the piece of text is beside each other so that when we talked about Crafting content to match it This approach worked really really well. So they were able to go. Okay, fine. I can see that the titles are roughly equivalent You're not gonna see it in the screenshot But we have little bits of JavaScript to tell them how far or how many how many characters of text they've got put in We couldn't enforce a strict content length as much as we'd want to but what we could do is give them warnings That they were going beyond the recommended content length So, you know, I mean at least then they were aware that they were putting in stuff That was just a bit too big for the various Presentations that would have on the website So things like this short description was used in various parts of the website where we used Different types of teasers and listings used to present this stuff So this this worked quite well This meant that the editors were able to get the content in put Irish and English in at the same time Keep it roughly equivalent from a from a length perspective so that at a visual perspective it looked roughly equivalent And and sorry to continue on that is the problem with I suppose Drupal's traditional multilingual approach is that you create the different language editions or versions independently and therefore you don't always get to see the two languages side by side and know that they're roughly Visually equivalent now, of course within the context of the modern web You shouldn't be worried about that at all You should be just worried about your content because you just don't know where your content is going to be presented But nonetheless, this is something that was required for this website So this is another example of it further down You know, we've got a two withy-wee getters tough to squeeze them onto the screen there But we did our best So they can keep adding on this content for various sections of the website Another another big success we had for this website was structured content So this was if not our very first paragraph module implementation Oh, sorry to give you back to where this site is built in Drupal 7 and I'll talk about Drupal 8 in a second But this was one of our very first approaches of using the paragraphs module So previously we'd been heavy proponents of field collections, but what we found with our Yeah, field collections module so what we found with field collections was it was a bit limiting in that it was a very Predefined approach to what you could have in a single field collection and mixing and matching different types of field collections Wasn't really doable. So as soon as paragraphs module came along We had exhausted how far we could get with field collections already and the paragraphs module really really Suits our approach to building websites and we're one that one it with this one the first website to be used building it So that this was something that worked really well as well because a lot of the sites a lot of pages on the website Will have varying amounts of content. So we had to come up with a design approach that would deal with something as simple as We've only got a headline and That's all we've got, but it's got to look good on the site or We've got ten pages of text and we ought to make sure it looks good on the site So rather than have predefined fields what we did was we came up with a number of different paragraph components and again each of these paragraph components will have different Fields to capture the various language requirements. So even something like in the the image captions would to make sure that Irish was available as well for Alts attributes and for hover states Various text components are going to have obviously Irish and English available side-by-side as well So the way that cuts presented end of the front end is in a relatively straightforward top-to-bottom approach present the different elements As paragraph components and they get laid out on the page one after another So this worked really well It let the editors keep adding stuff to pages that they weren't constrained by just a couple of Drupal fields We over the course of the project to be added a couple of different paragraph components And then they were available for different projects of the website So we've become very big paragraph components and use it in all our projects It's a key building tool for all of our sites multilingual or not Views is another tool to be used heavily as well So we've got a couple of examples of this and I'm going to get into it too much Because that isn't necessarily relevant to the dual language approach, but One of the things was we extended the and this is obviously not very visually pretty But as the volume of content exploded we needed a way to get all of the data and present it and search it and store and do content updates to it and Events were very I wish I could talk about this a bit more but events were a particular challenge on this website because In my head the definition of event is something that happens at a time at a place And it's hosted by somebody that's fairly common. You'd expect that to be mandatory fields for events We had events without dates Without locations without hosts, but we knew that we're going to happen. So therefore they're an event So we have like, you know this this proved extremely challenging and then you know, we were told Oh, no, we won't you know You don't need to worry about start dates and end dates We'll just you know tell people what month it's on because we're just a placeholder website They'll be going to the other websites to find out exact dates start dates Duration repeating all that kind of stuff and of course as the content grew their requirements grew and that's fine We're flexible developers will deal whatever strong at us But it definitely it definitely was a challenge to to have an event listing without a date Because how do you order it if you can't order it by date? But yet we knew More or less when these events are going to happen. So we had to come up with approaches for that But that's a talk for another day And so this is again views presentation. So this this was used heavily throughout the site We use views to present listings of sites and Listings and related content we use views heavily for that Also used entity field query to do some generate some custom listings as well Now I talk about what I'd like to have done differently. So hindsight is of course everything Every project you finish you always think oh well if only so the first thing I've done is Either would have waited a year to celebrate 1916 and use Drupal 8 But obviously not a particularly viable approach You know the multilingual handling within Drupal 8 is significantly better than Drupal 7 out of the box And even significantly better with Drupal 7 and all the various multilingual sites are multilingual Modules so when the sites is all there with sacred space at the Drupal 7 implementation It's we had it on multi-lingual Drupal 6 before that and suffice us to say when the day comes to port that to Drupal 8 It'll be a hell of a lot easier than it ever was in any of the previous two platforms We look forward to using to play for more and more multilingual sites. It'll definitely be a hell of a lot easier But I'm sure we'll find more problems So the other thing would have done is we would have stuck to our guns and use Drupal multilingual approach properly So rather than going for the different fields that you have that present the different content So you have an Irish field an English field. We would have said right you have an English Source content in an Irish translation And we would have done whatever it took in terms of a customer a custom editor experience to present an editor Experience have presented both language fields side-by-side, but yet we're stored by Drupal in Drupal standard way That came back to by this in a number of different ways things like revisions updates of translations When was the Irish updated as opposed to the English updated? Dealing with the external translators was obviously a problem because the standard Drupal tools that we use to make Translations available weren't available to us because of the approach we'd taken and we did look at refactoring to do that But you know, we sort of looked at the different approaches Can we write a custom export to solve that problem or do we need to do a rework and the custom export was vastly quicker? You know, maybe when all you've got is a hammer You just keep doing that so we were able to write a custom XML export without without a greatly difficult challenge I mean, it wasn't trivial, but it was definitely easier than a full rework of the site and Obviously you've seen that some of the design elements don't work very well when the content length has changed And we there was a good bit of back-and-forth with the client on that and we expressed You know concerns we had over mobile representation Accessibility and content length and I think on a few of them now that we see a lot more content And there maybe would have pushed back a bit more Again hindsight is everything we could have pulled up a lot more examples when we see the final content to go Hey, look, this doesn't really fly here You've got like a title that's you know 30 40 words long That's not going to work in various aspects of the site even if it was just one language much less if it was done in two languages The other thing is and I really I haven't got along to the talks on it this week But we this site is ripe for content staging There was an awful lot of content that was just not available in both languages And we would like to have waited until both translations are available fully approved and then push that content as an addition of the website And push it live so content staging would have been extremely useful for this site It's it's one of those things as soon as you hear about it and you read into it And you know actually yeah We've got an awful lot of sites where that would have been an extremely useful tool and this is the one that you know I wish we had the the time I guess to look at it a bit closely more closely in Drupal 7 and definitely We'll be looking at for a lot of our projects in Drupal 8 where that kind of stuff happens whereby people want to publish 30 pages simultaneously and Remove 20 other pages simultaneously and do things like that. So definitely content staging something We're going to be looking into a lot closer for our future projects So that that covers it in terms of the presentation we've got plenty of time for questions But I got a couple of other slides First is to enjoy everyone enjoy invite everyone along to the contribution sprints on Friday So there is something there for everyone regardless of your skill set or level with Drupal You're gonna have plenty of stuff that you can learn about I didn't manage to update the slides to say to invite everyone along to Trivia night on Thursday night. I'll be the MC on Thursday night. It'll be a lot of fun I'll be not quite as polite as I am today and It'll be good fun if you haven't been to Drupal con is definitely worth attending. It's a it's an eye-opening experience I hope you have a lot of fun Secondly we need to know what you thought of this so go to the Drupal org events website Evaluate this session. Let us know what you thought. I'm happy to hear Feedback good bad or indifferent after the talk as well. Let us know what you thought Please do that because that's going to decide, you know, the kind of talks that people will use for a future Will like to see it future Drupal events. So that is quite important even a couple of minutes definitely helps a lot So lastly, lastly, I'd like to thank you all. So I'm really weak as I guess. Yeah time for questions. Thanks very much Okay, so if anyone has any questions if you just make your way up to the mic So we get a recorded or I'll get in trouble from the room monitor. I Don't know the mic is working Martin. Don't be shy Did you get any pushback about the fact that you've got difference in contrast between the colors that you've used for English and Absolutely, so the color scheme was driven by the printed brochure to a large degree We didn't get an awful lot of variance on that and not as much as a boot of light But yeah, there is definitely an issue with that. It's not ideal. I've seen worse. I've done worse But it isn't ideal Yeah, there's a couple of other little things there in terms of accessibility I'm not overly happy with even like browsing and particularly the hover stuff to reveal the other content It's not ideal We've done our best. It was a bit more we could have done I mean look, there's always more you can do but there was a few that they were there in the back of my head Hey, I must get down and do things like mark different sections of text with different language attributes Now I'm not sure what difference that will make entirely from an accessible accessibility Perspective, but from an SEO perspective it definitely would have helped now You know, I mean, okay, SEO is important for every website, but it wasn't a key key thing for this We had enough problems with various stakeholders. We had to keep happy and things like that But yeah, there was a few little things I thought I would have liked to have done and We pushed back on plenty. There could mean a lot scarier stuff up there from an access accessibility expert perspective Let me put it that way And you've said you've said how happy you were and what you wish you'd done differently How how was the client were they? Yeah, this is fine or that they loved it or oh? They've been all I think they've been very happy to pay their bills I know they have they're like we're still doing work on the site still doing Editions and changes to various things. It's nominated for an award tonight. They are just what awards So we'll see what various other independent people think of it. Um, so yeah, it'll be interesting to see how that goes Thanks, Martin. Oh, I really liked how you took the perspective of the content editor into consideration But actually my question was Yeah, do you have like for accessibility reason? every content that is in English and Irish marked as language differently and so have you even tried with a Speech Thank you screen reader to Read the side out No, so I would have loved to spend a lot more time that like as you're some of you are aware Drupal's core accessibility maintainer works banner tech I would have loved to get them in there No, like I mean there's a lot of stuff that I know that we should have done better But sometimes proving it and I'm giving real-world examples of it So Andrew can definitely do some stuff in terms of presenting and driving home to the client. Hey look Here's where it works really badly the Stuff that we were we know we did at least everything's in text and That was a bit of a challenge because some of the printed material had very stylized versions and Infographics style representations of stuff So we got away from that and kept it with just text or at least it could be you know read and consumed by various different devices and search engines and things like that and Language attributes. I wish I'd been able to spend a bit more time on those But fully enough that would have been a bit easier Well, actually, no, it's not that is particularly hard but it just took a while to get it just right and You know Time budget materials, etc. Yeah, but yeah, we were worried that and we It's not as bad as it could have been but it definitely could be better, but I think that could be true of a lot of sites Sorry, I haven't been to the beginning but are there any limitations or regulations you should have you needed to adhere from the government for Yeah, so there are Interior yes and practice no So there are there is legislation in terms of accessibility and that kind of stuff I've yet to hear of anybody who is certainly in a in a government perspective where it's seen as oh no No, we really care about this over everything else or this is a given and if it means we can't do X Y or Z That's just fine. I wish it were so it would make my life a lot easier because I prefer to develop like that But no It you know, it's one of these things you see on on requests for tenders and then you come in and go Oh, well, we could do that, but that's a bit tricky from an accessibility perspective Oh, well, well, that doesn't care. You know, we want to do it this way, you know I like I mean look, I'm sure it's the same in every project not just in a government perspective and you do you know, I Guess every project is a is a bit of give and take so you do as much as you can So it isn't you know You get as much accessibility in so to speak as you can or try not to do something heinous with a website And that's our approach all these websites just do as much as you can but sometimes you can't do everything Any more questions? Thanks for the presentation first. And did you have any problems with search engine optimization with two languages? No, because it's not that we didn't care, but it definitely wasn't a top priority this project and We were aware of things that we could tweak to make things better if we needed to but because it never arose as being a priority There was time and money spent on other things It was one of the things I was kind of hoping it would happen Because I was looking forward to solving those problems, but it didn't arise as being a big issue At least yet Like we're currently in discussions with them as to what we do with this website now So the Ireland dot e domain name is not owned by the department of our churches and guilt. It's actually owned by Either the tourism authority or the industrial development authority Oh, yeah, the tourism authority owns the domain name and they've sort of loaned it back to the department of our Attorney for this for this year. So We're trying to work out is what's the appropriate representation for this content in the future Like do we just make an archive of it and just leave it there or do we do something different? Do we call it back to the appropriate content? You know as a snapshot and as a as a historical record of what happened or what so When all that's done, I think that's at a point where you'll have to think about Searching and optimization a bit more than we might have done for this This is very fluid and people knew to go here You know, we weren't overly concerned about getting stuff on top of search engines for for everything here It's important. Remember a lot of the content here, you know, well, it is represented on this website is represented on other websites as well So for example a lot of the or a lot of the events were presented by Different arts organizations, cultural organizations or local authorities So they also had their content up there as well and we kind of a you know, like I said, it's a political exercise here So if our event is listed higher than theirs on the search engine thing that probably wouldn't go down well either So, you know, you'd have political issues to navigate there as well as technical issues And a lot of little political issues just like that. It seems facetious. It seemed outrageous But yeah, we had to deal with little political problems like that as well And so answer accepted. Thanks. Thanks I would fight tooth and nail to avoid the co-lingual approach It's just not practical like again the context was that this was only ever meant to be seen as a visual thing as a nice to look at Thing but not very deep or heavy. It was always going to point to other websites So within that context we sort of said, okay fine the co-lingual thing we can go with that But as soon as you start getting into volumes of content like the way I look at it is like I speak a couple of languages at various levels of But I'd never choose to have them both Side by side and read them both. I mean, I certainly wouldn't do that Now maybe I'm wrong and I haven't done any research or look for research to say yes People do that if they speak a language as a second language. They like to have that available and then also have the English as the source content Like if you use Google translate for example, they'll translate it and then you can hover over to see the source language and things like that I don't know. Maybe maybe they've done the research and thought that that works for people Maybe that's a way to do co-lingual. Yeah What are the languages All right, okay, and like I guess the kind of it's all available in Welsh using a more traditional approach to present to multiple languages I suppose I'll go back to the EU cookie implementation as an example whereby I My argument to my interpretation of the law suggests that there's no need for that pop-up That you can fulfill the legal obligations by not having the pop-up now I win that fight sometimes and other times people go off to legal people and say oh, no You have to have a pop-up and I don't think they're doing the work because I really don't think there's a need for that But somehow people somebody somewhere says oh no, you need to have a pop-up to meet that legislative requirement And I think it could be the same for something like a multi-lingual approach like what does the legislation really say? Does it really say side-by-side or does it say something like both languages have to present it on an equal basis? Well that to me means that they're both available fully in that language. That's what equality really means It isn't that they're presented visually side-by-side So that's where I'd probably go back to is a little let's look at the legislative requirement here Does it really say side-by-side? I really doubt it. It's gonna have some phrasing That's away from that and I'd fight tooth and nail to find a combination of legal advice to say you don't need it And I'm actually will use our testing to say that it doesn't work It'll work for it'll to be honest with you calling will work fine Whereby you don't have significant volumes of content and it's primarily a brochure site It'll you know and that's where we were starting that was our target I guess at the start and it'll work just fine for that But once once it once you go beyond that it doesn't really work And we you know we did our best and you can see that you know some things we don't like and we would Would have done differently and people correctly brought up various issues like one of the things I don't like is there is the mobile experience because you present an awful lot of content that you don't consume and You're like okay the the bits and the bytes won't really matter But it's from a scrolling experience. It's really suboptimal and you know I didn't get very far when I was making those objections I probably need to do a better job at the political side of things maybe over the development side of things But yeah, I'd go back to that go back to legislation and go back to the get get better legal advice And go back to the user testing to back that up then Just out of thought you discuss some of the options of other ways that you could do By lingual multi-lingual sites One thing you could do is that your your front page or some kind of splash page could be Co-lingual and as soon as someone's clicked on any kind of link you say are you clicked on the Welsh link or the Irish link and Then just give them the content in that language So that you you would feel like you've entered a site and you haven't It hasn't opted for one language over the other as a default I mean you could do that but the reality is like even with a website like this Most people aren't going to navigate to the front page, you know, that's one entry point that might cover 10-15% of use cases depending on the websites you have and therefore, you know You need to look beyond that anyway, and therefore I think you can do a much better job as a home page as it being just a splash page That I don't like splash pages. They feel like a very old-school approach I will type in a URL address and I will get to the home page and I will continue my journey Whereas the reality is this content is consumed not just to different URLs as landing pages But by different devices search engines assistive technologies things like that So you really need to tackle it at a lot of different levels and I look yeah The the splash page certainly the and advice detection one is interesting our language detection I think that's what we do a lot of sites is we will present the home page as Detected but offer the choice to switch as well. So hopefully we can get it right more often than not Or and if we don't then when the user the user still has the power to switch and override with the browser settings might be Do you think people actually set their browsers up with the language settings? I know at least one person who does yeah I think they do I mean I I know I have like I know my girlfriend's desires as a first language So she does so any website she'll browse and like what you'll have there is more that Firefox and Chrome are very well localized So she lived and I'm not sure about the operating system. It certainly Firefox is so she will be able to browse and You know I have to decipher error messages when I see them. Okay, so that's access tonight then right, okay All right, I'll look at the HTTP codes before look at the error messages and Work from there, but yeah, like that will send a message to the server I think what you're more likely less likely to have is server implementations that follow that in other words that actually look at the HTTP header you're probably likely have a lot more browsers that do it than servers that respect it Just as a point to the previous question. I worked for a Belgian Company, so we have three natural languages, so we always have to do multilingual stuff slash pages. Do not work I have to 100% agree because One day it's never the entry points if you have to redirect them to that It's just a lot of work that you actually don't want to do Now You end up having two home pages you have your smash page and your home page It's in a translated state. So what point when someone clicks home? Where are they going? So that's another problem. Yeah, yeah usually Love coming to fix it by just having different Domain names for different languages all day in their brochures and all communication can actually point them to a different URL Which spits it up a lot easier and if they need to switch you can always switch. That's not a big problem Automatically detecting languages does still tend to be a problem for us because well in my case I have everything set up and most of the time Things will still send me to wrong. Yeah language by default. So Yeah, you can never rely on it. It's only a hint to the browser So like like on the site that we have and we do use language detection We also the user can override that obviously and choose the another language and we also do language We do regional detection as well So they get to send different content for different markets and again We couldn't trust that because well, they come up with all sorts of crazy scenarios But like oh well, I could be French and in London browsing the web Like fine. We solve that use case What's more likely is the scenario you talked about whereby, you know, the browser just isn't behaving or they're getting an IP address from another location And he's like that. Yeah plus for us because Belgium's a pretty small country But we do have our three languages and all neighboring countries speak those languages We'll often have that they Like the French part of Belgium will also I so a company that's located there will also sell stuff or Communicate to France. Oh, yeah, but they'll want different content for France than they want for the French speaking Belgians Yeah, so in that kind of situation Yeah So what we've learned over the years that that translations is only half the deal that regionalization is the next bit So I mean I wasn't really an issue on this site But the other side that I shows an example we use the language detection, you know We have a scenario whereby I think we're single to have at least three if not four different English language versions of the site To deal with different markets So scenarios I'd never thought about whereby we need to have an English language version of the website for the French market Which is going to serve different content to the UK to the Irish to the American version And they're also going to be in English, but they're gonna have completely different or not completely different But different content because they serve those Markets differently and yet they want to present the content available to those markets in multiple languages as well So yeah, it can get pretty tricky pretty quickly Yeah, also point to yeah using flags that only that can help if you have different regions and you have the first region And then a language, but even then it's often also not like a good idea Just as a point to one thing. Yeah, that's right because the languages don't work for regions Sorry, they don't work for for languages because language boundaries and political boundaries don't work They don't they're not one for one, but you're right regional Boundaries don't necessarily map to countries either So leave a scenario whereby you talked about like the French markets a good one So whereby you live a Belgian company serving particular Services to the French market, which is different to the Belgium market and yet the content will be in French And then another version in French We found that because we had like that particular site is you know there they split Germany by north to south of their own little wall they built and Well, I mean it's common enough like Aldi Norton sued in Germany as well So, you know, they want to present different content to different sections of just within one country as well Which again flags aren't gonna cut it there either Lovely. Thanks very much Okay, we'll wrap it up there. I'm gonna be down at our stand I think it's what six zero one or whatever if you go in the front door of the of the hall downstairs Our stand is over in the right-hand side. So come up and say hello If you have any other questions let us know Anatech have a couple of more presentations this week and obviously we'll be there Heavily involved in trivia night as well. So thanks very much for your time and have a good Drupalcon Because The all their translators are volunteers and what that meant was they went over and beyond they were like Volunteers tend to be very enthusiastic about what stuff they can help out with so what they found was they had translators They were only dying to help out and they've got languages that are obscure and Don't have a huge user base But they've got a brilliant translation because I've got one or two users who were so Determined to make sure that that site was available for them and it extended beyond language They were able to help us with regionalization stuff as well So we've an Arabic site and the Arabic user was able to help us with right to let's right to left stuff Now they're only small little things But you know little things like when you test in Arabic or Hebrew and you can't read the script You can't even tell if it's garbled or it's whatever they were able to help us with the testing there as well So as an organization that's based on volunteers, you're in a really good position actually because they tend to be as good They tend to be better translators because they're you know Yeah The translation workflow was always interesting because every time you start people go, okay So that must be there's one obvious way to translations in their head I think I don't know about different workflows and possibilities and fallbacks like oh We hadn't really thought about that, you know, yeah Oh, no, no, we won't present it in other languages if it isn't available in English and it's not translated Then we won't present it. Well, why don't you just present it? They just everyone has their fix idea in their little head about oh, yeah, that's how translations go But it, you know, there's always there's so many different ways to handle them You know and I'm working that out is more than half of the puzzle. So working out what the appropriate appropriate language translation workflow is is hard and then the foundations get a bit easier after that Cool, thanks very much Well, you won't for the various reasons we talked about or you shouldn't you know Like this like there is I think that use case limited use case whereby it makes sense and we were there for a good while And now we've drifted a little bit away from it and we were hitting challenges Yeah, I think it works. I think it worked. Yeah, yeah, and not with some of the challenge that worked quite well See that's that's where it worked quite well because you're able to like spend time looking at the wording Looking at the number items in the menu you could you could spend a lot more time doing the content crafting on it But in some ways, it's the issues that you face are the same issues you face whereby You're building a CMS and you wanted to evolve and change But if you were to do that then was a no no you can't change that menu that we've worked really hard to pick single words That we translate is and they fit really nicely there, you know, and then you lose that when you move to it Like what what is a relatively inflexible solution at least in terms of content length on the way Not when you get into longer phrases Yeah Paragraph Thanks for the questions it's always good to get the first one to get the ball rolling