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Why isn't this built in already?

It is a fair question, and people ask it a lot in German-speaking countries. Drupal CMS 1.0 came out on 15 January 2025. Why does a German installation still give you a website full of English sample content?

The short answer: it is not a lack of interest. It comes down to priorities and missing technology.

The interface matters more than sample text

Drupal is built largely by volunteers and by companies that donate their time. That time is limited, and the Drupal CMS team has to decide which problems to solve first. Seen that way, translating the templates is not the most urgent task, for good reasons:

  • Sample content is a placeholder. The texts of a template are meant to be replaced with your own. Some templates might as well contain "Lorem ipsum".
  • The user interface is still incomplete in many languages. The menus, forms and messages people work with every day are not fully translated in many languages yet. Every translation there helps every user, every day, not just on first impression.

That trade-off makes sense, and we share it. German is an exception here: its interface translation on localize.drupal.org is very good, which makes the remaining gap all the more visible.

There simply was no way to do it

Even people who wanted to translate the templates hit a wall:

  • Code gets translated, content doesn't. The translation platform localize.drupal.org collects the texts from the code of Drupal and its modules. Sample content (pages, menus, image descriptions) is content, and there was no intended way to translate it.
  • The order is wrong. The installer creates the sample content before the community translations are loaded. Even an existing translation would arrive too late.
  • The templates are young and diverse. Today's templates, with their extensive sample pages and the Canvas page builder, are much younger than Drupal CMS 1.0. They come from different agencies and change with almost every release.
  • There were many stumbling blocks on the way. While translating all templates we ran into numerous bugs in Canvas, the Drupal CMS installer, the templates and their themes. Some templates could not even be installed for a while. The overview is in How our solution works.

Gábor Hojtsy laid the foundation for a translation path with Default Content Locale. This project builds on it.

Why we do it anyway

In Germany, Austria and Switzerland people expect software to come to them in their own language. Someone who installs Drupal CMS in German and sees a half English website does not think "the translation is still missing", but: "Why is everything here still in English? I installed the software in German. This can't be a good content management system!"

That is exactly the first impression we want to avoid and get right instead: choose German, get German. So we close the gap ourselves, as a community contribution:

  • We complement Drupal CMS rather than compete with it. Interface translations remain the more important task. Our project takes no time away from the Drupal CMS team.
  • We report every bug we find to the project it belongs to, so it gets fixed for everyone.
  • The approach works for any language. If you want to contribute your language, see the guide for translators. If you build templates, see the guide for developers.

Our goal is for this solution to become unnecessary one day, because Drupal CMS ships it itself.