Default Content Locale Extended

Makes Drupal CMS site templates speak your language: pages, menus, forms and image descriptions are translated while a template is installed, instead of arriving in English.

Drupal CMS offers ready-made site templates – for a non-profit, a school, a council, a conference and more. Their sample content is written in English. If you install Drupal CMS in another language, you get a translated administration interface, but a website whose home page, menus, articles and forms are still English. Default Content Locale Extended closes that gap: it translates the template's content and configuration during installation, so the site is in your language from the first page view.

Features

• Translates sample content while it is imported: nodes, taxonomy terms, media, menu links, image alternative texts and Canvas pages – including headers, footers and formatted text in components.
• Translates configuration shipped by templates that Drupal does not cover on its own: Canvas page regions and patterns, webform elements (labels, placeholders, options, buttons) and some theme and module settings.
• Makes the content the site's own language. On a monolingual site the English values are replaced in place – no orphaned English versions, no half-translated entities.
• Fixes the URL aliases: aliases exported as English are moved to the site language (otherwise the front page returns 404), and redirects are created where translated titles change hard-coded paths.
• Respects Canvas component versions: strings that are part of versioned component settings are never translated through locale (which would break pages); they are translated in the content only.
• Leaves machine values alone: icon names, link targets, IDs, CSS values and the like are never translated.
• Tooling for translators: drush dcle:template-pot lists every translatable string of a template as a .pot or .po file, with the place where it is used, and can list only the strings that are still missing.
• Works without a patched installer: drush dcle:site-templates adds localized variants of the site templates to the Drupal CMS installer, e.g. "Haven (localized)".

Translations currently shipped: German for all 16 free Drupal CMS 2.2 site templates, French for Haven. The approach works for any language – contributions are very welcome.

Use it when you build Drupal CMS sites in a language other than English and want the template to be a usable starting point, when you demo Drupal CMS to non-English speakers, or when you want to translate a site template into your language.

Post-Installation

There is no configuration page. The module works while a site template is installed, so it has to be active before the template imports its content:

1. Add the module and the site template to your Drupal CMS project:
   composer require drupal/PROJECT_NAME drupal/haven
2. Add localized variants of the templates to the installer:
   drush dcle:site-templates
3. Install Drupal CMS in your language and choose e.g. Haven (localized).

Installing the module on a site whose template is already installed does not translate existing content.

To translate a template into a new language, install it, run drush dcle:template-pot haven --language=fr --untranslated-only and translate the listed strings. See the documentation for the full workflow and how to contribute translations.

Additional Requirements

• Drupal core 11 with the Interface Translation (locale) module.
• Drupal CMS 2.x site templates.
• Drush 13 for the commands.
• The included submodule for Canvas pages requires Canvas.

Recommended modules/libraries

• Canvas: most Drupal CMS site templates are built with it; enable the included Canvas submodule to translate Canvas pages.
• Webform: form elements of templates are translated when Webform is used.
• For German: the German Drupal CMS installer translates the installer itself and works around a few template and theme bugs that are not the job of this module.

Similar projects

Default Content Locale by Gábor Hojtsy connects Drupal's default content importer with locale, so imported content can be translated. Default Content Locale Extended is a fork of it, made for Drupal CMS site templates: it additionally handles non-English Drupal CMS installations (the original aborts with "status cannot be NULL" and leaves orphaned English versions), URL aliases, image alternative texts, Canvas pages and component versions, webforms and configuration, and ships ready-made translations. Both cannot be installed at the same time. Many thanks to Gábor for the original work – without it this project would not exist.

Supporting this Module

The best support is a translation: translate a site template into your language and submit it as a merge request. Reports about templates that stay partly English are just as welcome in the issue queue.

Community Documentation

• Documentation (English and German): how it works, why Drupal CMS does not translate templates out of the box yet, guides for translators and developers.
• Bug reports found while translating all Drupal CMS 2.2 site templates, ready to be filed with the projects they belong to.