Project:News/Newsletter 2013-04

This month's subject: New editor dust settling down, and more changes ahead

Hello, dear friend.

This is the translatewiki.net e-mail newsletter for April 2013. We have taken the new translation editor into production, we are preparing an awesome new homepage and are making preparations for adding localisation support for an innovative visual programming editor. Continue reading for more information and a sneak preview, only for you!

Thank you for supporting translatewiki.net. The success of open source software localisation relies on your continued involvement and enthusiasm. Please try and dedicate 15 minutes a week – preferably do more and bring your friends! – to updating and reviewing translations for your favourite project.

Redesigned translation editor launched
The project to implement a newly designed translation editor is nearing its end. The new editor is now enabled for all translators. We are in the stages of adding the last features (like giving access to the history of the translation and quick access to all translations in other languages). We are thankful to everyone who provided us with valuable feedback to get to where we currently are. Of course we will keep on working on improving the editor further, but definitely not at a pace that we have been for the past months. If you experience issues, have questions or want to make a suggestion, our Support page is always open.

Redesign of the translatewiki.net main page coming
At the Wikimedia DevCamp Bangalore in November 2012, a new design of the translatewiki.net home page was first created by volunteer designers Praseetha KR, Asutosh Kar, Uttam Grandhi and Rishabh Rao in collaboration with Arun Ganesh and Pau Giner. In December and January Pau and Arun and completed the design. A few weeks ago the Wikimedia Language Engineering team's developers started implementing it. Development is not yet complete. You can have a sneak peak, though! Future improvements will be user creation and a translation sandbox, as well as polishing of the visual layout.

Behind the scenes

 * Last month we set up Solr to search for translations. By now, the new schema is active and search has never been as fast. Using the facets for languages and groups, you can easily fine-tune the search results.
 * We are in the final stages of preparing support for Blockly, a web-based, graphical programming editor. Users can drag blocks together to build an application. No typing required.
 * An error in our git support scripts caused a broken localisation updates commit in OpenStreetMap. Measures have been taken to correct and prevent this. Thanks go to Tom Hughes for resolving the immediate problem.
 * Be afraid! Siebrand has learned to use git rebase --interactive. No links for this, but hopefully it will help us fix issues in MediaWiki master on the live site quicker :).
 * Wikimedia has improved compression of their repositories in Gerrit. This saves many gigabytes of diskspace at the translatewiki.net server for supporting MediaWiki.

If you are a developer of a promising Free or Open Source Software product and you are looking for a great community to localise your product, please get in touch with us! The same goes for those that wish to aid in developing the Translate extension further.

Follow translatewiki on Twitter for the latest news.

Finally, if you are not a translator yet, please complete the steps that will get you the status of translatewiki.net translator and allow you to be a localisation hero!

We welcome feedback about this newsletter. Please let us know by sending a reply to this mail. We will try to accommodate your wishes.

Siebrand Mazeland

translatewiki.net staff

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