Input Drupal 8 Installation Language

[Mikael Berger]

Somewhere around the arrival of Drupal 8 the possibility to choose language seems to have been lost in the automated installation procedure provided by Plesk.

Installation using installation language is against Drupal's recommendations for multilingual sites: Choosing and installing multilingual modules .

As a matter of fact, adding a language and setting it as default can cause problems in Drupal core modules such as Admin, Contact and Views for mono-language, non-English sites as well.

Should this problem prevail in Plesk, I would recommend manual installation with Drush/Composer/Git or else switch to a more Drupal-friendly server administration panel tool.

 

[UFHH01]

Hi Mikael Berger,

thank you for your suggestion.
Are you aware, that the installation of Drupal with the help of the "Application Vault" is always set to "none" ( so "english" as standart is being used ), when it comes to the locale settings? Could you explain, how this setup is "against Drupal's recommendations" ?

 

[Mikael Berger]

Hi, thanks for fast attending.

Please find the Drupal recommendation in the previously posted link, which contains the following: "If you are making a multilingual site, choose one of the languages that you will be using as the installation language, and preferably not English..."

As of my experience from building several Spanish sites, not following Drupal's recommendation casues various, unforeseeable problems. This is why we should desire to be able to choose installation language.

 

[UFHH01]

Hi Mikael Berger,

sorry, but your conclusion that each Drupal installation is a "multilingual installation" sounds kinda strange to me, as this is just not the fact for our Plesk users. If you desire to modify a basic installation, there are no limits and choosing your preferred language after your basic installation is as well a user choice, which Plesk would never pre-define. The package, which is packed by Plesk comes straight from the vendor ( => drupal.org ) and Plesk didn't implement any modifications at all to this basic installation package, apart that there is no language pre-definition ( which is indeed not relevant for the installation procdure ).

Could you pls. explain the issues/errors/problems, that you experience, when choosing the desired primary language AFTER the basic installation? It would help very much, if you could give us a step-by-step guide, how we might be able to reproduce your ( possible ) issues/errors/problems, so that the developers are able to investigate it and find a way to fix your issues/errors/problems.


While we do have plans to invent a "Plesk Drupal Toolkit", just like the current "Plesk WordPress Toolkit" and the upcoming "Plesk Joomla! Toolkit", you could tell us as well your desires and needs for such a new toolkit for Drupal users.

 

[Mikael Berger]

I am truly pleased to hear of your plans to invent a Drupal Toolkit, that would be brilliant.

The issue affects sinlge-language site as well. To replicate, just install in English and then add another language and set as default. But I would not spend too much time on that, this is not about fixing Drupal but to add a feature in Plesk. It was actually possible to choose language when installing Drupal 7 once upon a time. If Plesk invokes Drush, maybe it is just a matter of adding the --locale argument?

Going back to the Toolkit plans, I would say that one very important matter would be to keep track with Composer, Drush and Git. Many Drupal modules have to be installed with Composer and I personally think it is the way to go for Drupal core as well. There are also some Drupal themes, such as the very popular Bootstrap, for which Compass is deployed to compile stylesheets. Both dependency management and compilation can be quite awkward for unexperienced people, so I think these could be valuable features in the toolkit.

Cheers

 

[UFHH01]

Hi Mikael Berger,

To replicate, just install in English and then add another language and set as default.

I couldn't experience any issues/errors/problems, testing it on two different servers ( Debian/Ubuntu ) and domains with the standart package from the application vault. Would you mind including depending log - entries from webserver - logs, please, which point to any issues/errors/problems?

 

[Mikael Berger]

These are examples of problems that have ocurred to me:

• Contact form not available for one the new language
• Some default Views are not created with filters on language
• Admin interface only partially translated.

I should also mention that I have found Drupal's behaviour somewhat unpredictable. That is, the problems are not always the same. I would say it depends on post-installation procedures and maybe even Drupal version.

On the other hand, please be advised that there is no point in relating this to operative systems or checking server logs. This is all about what happens in Drupal when one is forced to modify its basic language settings after install. Thus, it all boils down to the possibility to set language on beforehand. In a manual install we can do that, just as Drupal recommends in its documentation.