drupal 7 internationalisation il8n load node

Question

I'm a part-time developer (ranked Enthusiastic Amateur) and am trying to develop my first multilingual site in Drupal 7 using the Internationlisation (il8n) suite.
After following the initial setup directions, I'm now trying to implement a "featured article" column where Articles flagged as Featured appear in a list in the right-hand column of the page.
Ordinarily I'd simply do a "db_query" to return a list of node ids and then do a node_load() for each result.
However, how do I do this using il8n to ensure that I'm pulling out the correct language versions of the Articles?

Any and all help is greatly appreciated, ~Matt Bridger

Answer 1

Use the i18n_node_get_lang() function to check the language of the nodes and load only the ones with the right language.

Answer 2

Typically you would use Views module (http://drupal.org/project/views). To create a block listing the nodes you want, and then under Filter Language, use Content: Language set to Current User's Language to filter for only the language being viewed. With this solution, there is no need to write any code, unless you need some advanced theming for your list.