Last week's first round of the code sprint focused on improving multilingual support in Drupal core ended on a high point: a major improvement to the UI for administering string translations was committed, thanks to great work by Roger López, Jakub Suchy, and Stella Power and some careful review by Angie Byron. Several others pitched into additional issues. Yesterday as we started into the second round of the sprint we rolled up our sleeves and dug into some of the most challenging issues remaining. First up was adding multilingual support to the new Fields API. Francesco Placella, Daniel F. Kudwien and Nat Catchpole tackled the complex issues of how to fit multilingual support within the existing Fields API object structure and storage patterns. Here's the issue. Next was writing new APIs for the locales system in core, so it can handle user-defined as well as code-based text (strings). Here the team for the day included Jose A. Reyero, Roger López, and me. Feeling brave or reckless, we began by asking--just how much sense does the current schema that we're trying to base APIs off of make? As can tend to happen, the more we looked at the existing tables (locales_source, locales_target), the less they seemed to meet the needs of user-defined strings. Watch today for us to start to completely rewrite the storage structure for strings in core--or to see the folly of our ways and content ourselves with minor tweaks and a shiny new set of APIs. There are plenty of other issues to tackle. Please consider joining in. Today we'll be pressing ahead in #drupal-i18n. If you're new to IRC, see these pointers to get you started. Just drop by and let us know you're interested in helping. We'll get you matched up with an issue that fits your interests and skill level. Want to help? If code sprints aren't your scene or you have a different set of skills, there are plenty of ways to participate and contribute. Feel free to contact me or any of the other organizers of the sprint with your ideas. While we've made a lot of headway, there's no shortage of additional work to do to solidify and strengthen international support in Drupal core. Yesterday we were already talking about extending the sprint and/or forming an ongoing working group. Stay tuned!