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).

Development teams have quickened up the pace with the release of Mambo 4.6.2. The release marks the completion of the complete revision of the Language Manager that began with the initial 4.6 release.  The Mambo core is now fully translatable.

Other features introduced in this minor version release include:

• Stability & security improvements
• Lighter database footprint
• A number of bug fixes
• Improved compatibility with older 3rd party extensions
• Added support for 4.5.x style SEF URLs
• Updates to many of the internal extensions
• MOStlyCE WYSIWYG editor enhancements (cross browser compliance issues addressed via an update to TinyMCE v2.1.0)

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"While it certainly makes no attempt to constitute a complete guide to the Ruby language, this tutorial will introduce you to some of the basics of Ruby. We'll power through a crash-course in object oriented programming, covering the more common features of the language along the way, and leaving the more obscure aspects of Ruby for a dedicated reference guide. I'll also point out some of the advantages that Ruby has over other languages when it comes to developing applications for the Web."

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PHP 5.2.1 has been released and includes a number of stability and security enhancement of the 5.X branch.  Besides the usual bug fixes (over 180 of them), PHP 5.2.1 also includes the following key improvements:

• Several performance improvements in the engine, streams API and some Windows specific optimizations.
• PDO_MySQL now uses buffered queries by default and emulates prepared statements to bypass limitations of MySQL's prepared statement API.
• Many improvements and enhancements to the filter and zip extensions.
• Memory limit is now always enabled, this includes Windows builds, with a default limit of 128 megabytes.
• Added several performance optimizations using faster Win32 APIs (this change means that PHP no longer supports Windows 98).
• FastCGI speed optimized build of PHP for Windows made available for downloading.

Further details about this release can be found in the official release announcement 5.2.1.  A full list of changes is available in the ChangeLog PHP 5 at php.net.

"The world of the web has become a global village. We are now a click away from Russia, Australia, Germany, Israel, Kenya, and the Antarctic.

Learning to work in a virtual global village can be challenging but there are many WordPress Plugins that will help you get your message across, no matter what language you speak or read."

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