When Pfizer spun off its animal health company to create Zoetis, it needed to create a new online home for the company and its country-specific subsidiaries – all 60+ of them. Each company needed a multi-lingual site that could share content, layout, users, roles, and interfaces with the parent site.

As the lead developer and site builder for this project, I chose Domain Access and i18n, which together allow multiple, multilingual sites to run on a single Drupal instance.

Domain Access makes it possible to share users, content, themes and everything else between multiple domains without having more than one database or Drupal instance. The i18n module is the most tried and true multilingual solution there is for Drupal. These two modules don't play nice together out of the box, but with some handy tricks it's possible to get everything smoothed out and working beautifully.

Attendees will come away with an overview of strategies to use when building a production-ready international-ready platform with very little coding.

The learning goals for this session are to:

• understand the basic mechanics of Domain Access
• know the right combination of integration modules beyond the i18n and Domain Access core
• make your site portable so you can test and launch it in different environments
• see how each site's homepage can be strangely hard to find – and what to do about it
• understand how using different themes on each site may have repercussions on how you build your content types
• learn the difference between site-specific and language-specific variable storage and figure out what goes where