Not long ago, Development Seed posted a fantastic comparison of multilingual handling between Drupal 5 and Drupal 6.

Many people who’ve heard the buzz about multilingual features making it into Drupal core have asked me if they should go ahead with their multilingual projects on Drupal 5 or push them back to wait for Drupal 6 to be released. Of course there are many factors to consider, but with multilingual websites there’s no doubt that two big factors are workflow and contributed modules.

Jose just pulled together an excellent comparison chart that should help make that decision easier. The chart below compares the multilingual support with Drupal 5 to Drupal 6.

One of the criticisms of many open source CMS is that they're not fully "international", especially for those languages that are written/read from right to left. Many projects, are quickly addressing the critics by placing significant focus on improving the multilingualism in their CMS. For example, not only will Drupal 6 (still under development) have improved multilingual support but so will Joomla 1.5 (nearing release candidate stage).

While many of these projects have had some to support multilingual features through third-party contributed modules / plugins / extensions it's only recently that the core development teams for these projects have really began addressing the need. With so much focus this year on enterprise content management systems, perhaps 2008 will be known as the year of the international content management system? Yes, multilingual support brought to you by an open source project near you.