gnurou.org Just your average bearded geek

Running a multilingual site can be a real pain, depending on what you exactly want to obtain. Drupal comes with an internationalization module that does a real good job on most cases. However, mine didn't fit within its features. Some of my content is written in English, other in French — exclusively. There is no use to translate every page to both languages.

What bothers me more in the current i18n module is that it always prefixes all your local URLs with the current language. That is, instead of having '/my/node', you'd have '/en/my/node' or '/fr/my/node'. This is not really serious by itself, but I started worrying when I realized that pages without any translation were both available under '/en/' and '/fr/', and that the only difference between the two versions was the language of Drupal's user interface. Having the same content referenced under different URLs is not a clean design to me, and it becomes objectively very bad when it comes to Search Engine Optimization.

Finally, I've put some decent site here. After trying many CMS solutions, I've decided to use Drupal.

Drupal is actually the only one (of those I have tested, at least) that supports all the features I wanted:

• Combines static pages with blog posts. I like to rant here and there but the main purpose of this site is to publish static content.
• A comment system, trackbacks and ping, just like any blog software. To combine the best of both worlds.
  
• Total control over the layout of the site (not that I did anything big about it - the current theme is just a slightly modified version of the Pushbutton theme). Oh, and standards compliance is a must too.
  
• WYSIWYG editor (TinyMCE) for both content and comments, also offering an easy way to upload images and other files. I'm fine with wiki-like syntaxes, but a good editor just gives another level of comfort.
• Powerful control on what is authorized or not. Ability to disable unwanted engine mechanisms (user registration, etc.).
• Nice URLs with explicit names. The URL alias mechanism is really powerful.
• Page caching to be easy with my poor server, although this is not turned on right now. Surprisingly, and although the pages are generated on-the-fly for now, the site performs rather well.
• Tags for anything that is published. I love tagging.
• RSS feeds for tags, content type, and so on. Drupal support RSS feeds as-is but more personalized feeds can be created using the views module.
• A strong and large community.
  

Now that the site is up and running I'm really satisfied with it. Although it has plenty of features, the modular design of Drupal let you use only those that are strictly necessary. You can really and easily tailor a website to your will. Drupal is a very active project, able to cover a wide range of needs. I've also closely considered Geeklog, which was very close to my needs too. But in the end, Drupal seems to have a much wider community and zillions of more-or-less useful modules, so I finally decided to use it.