In the past several days, I've been working on several bugfixes and performance improvements, preparing the site for the imminent landing of Drupal 7's first alpha release, which will also be the first tarball version of Drupal 7 and mark the string freeze stage of development on this latest Drupal version. What that means, is you might start flooding the site exporting and importing .po files as well as generally scramble to translate Drupal 7 and beat other language teams to it. You'll surely notice the start flag in a couple days to kick off the race.

Localize.drupal.org has support for Drupal 7's localization API for quite some time now, so that should not be an issue for us. However, there were some (admittedly fairly badly coded) SQL queries used when new release source codes were parsed and your .po files were imported, which were holding our servers down unnecessarily. Following a quick tip from Drupal.org user droplet, I've looked into implementing more elegant string matching solutions, which resulted in amazing performance increases when importing .po files and parsing source code for new releases. Updated code was deployed earlier this week. This should largely help with the potential flood of .po files coming in the following weeks.

While having translations on localize.drupal.org is fine, getting it to your Drupal sites is even more interesting. Therefore Jose Reyero picked up development of this functionality and is doing it in a new Localization update module. The reason it is not part of an existing module is that this will be required in any install profile which would need to be localized and bundling in a whole set of unrelated functionality (like the whole Localization client) might not be desired. There is also a Localized Drupal install profile which is forming to be a base install profile for a localized core-only distribution. We are preparing tools for install profile builders to include in their profiles to language-enable them as easily as possible.

Finally, unfortunately there is not that big of an activity around reworking the translation UI to a fancy new user interface that many people said they love. It would be great if more people could help out there refactoring this huge patch to smaller digestible chunks, so we can get the improvements in. Working with, reviewing and testing a 116K patch is no small feat. Thanks to anybody who is helping out.