How to Begin a French Version of My Site?

Question

I have an English site at the moment. I'd like to start a French version of it, but I get a bit confused when I look at the options out there. I am running Drupal 7.

Here's what I'd like:

• When you go to example.com, it is in English. When you go to example.fr, it is in French.
• There should be an option to switch from English -> French or French -> English, redirecting to the appropriate domain.
• Some nodes on the English side will not have equivalent nodes on the French, and vice-versa. Some will, and some will not.
• I wonder if it's possible to have different settings per site? For instance, I have a social media module that has icons for following on Twitter/Facebook etc. I'd like to have the French site show the links to the French versions of those, like my French FB page.

What would be the best way of doing these things?

Answer 1

Drupal support multi-language websites and creating a multi-language site is very easy.

You can configure a Drupal website to use a language other than English and you can configure a site to use multiple languages.

If your site requires the interface to be displayed in multiple languages or if you need to customize the interface of a single language site, the first step is to enable the multilingual capabilities of Drupal.

You can also configure a Drupal site to allow your users to switch languages and you can translate content into multiple languages.

Helpful Resources:

• Multilingual Guide Tutorial
• Building a Multi-Language Site
• How To: Basic Internationalization Setup

• Translating Site Interfaces

• Translating Content Contributed Modules for Localization and
  Internationalization

• Core Modules for Localization and
  Internationalization

• Cookbook: Build a Non-English D7 Website

• Localization API

• Internationalization (i18n) module
• Book: Drupal 7 Multilingual Sites (Kristen Pol)

Videos:

• Building a Multilingual, Multidomain Drupal Site
• Multilingual Site Setup and Management
• Multilingual Module Madness! Which i18n Modules Do You Really Need?

Getting Started:

• Localized Drupal Distribution: A small distribution to install Drupal with user interface translations pulled automatically from localize.drupal.org. It is suggested you use this distribution to start off with Drupal if you'd like to set up a localized site.
• Internationalization: This is a collection of modules to extend Drupal core multilingual capabilities and be able to build real life multilingual sites.
• Internationalization (i18n) Submodules: A collection of submodules that provides extended multilingual support for Drupal. Each module addresses a specific functionality.
• Apache Solr Multilingual: The goal of this project is to cleanly extend Apache Solr Search Integration to provide: better support for non-English languages, support for multilingual search, cross-language information retrieval (CLIR), and an easy-to-use administration interface. Apache Solr Multilingual does not replace Apache Solr Search but is based on it.
• Related Modules: A list of additional contributed Drupal 7 modules that extend Drupal's multilingual features