Project:News/Newsletter 2012-11

This month's subject: Prepare for changes - Things will be easier and prettier

Hello, dear friend.

This is the http://translatewiki.net e-mail newsletter for November 2012. It features news on MediaWiki localisation and changes in supported products. 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 to updating and reviewing translations for your favourite project.

Changes in supported products
Since the last newsletter, support for one new product was added, and support for many other products was updated. This change log is not complete.


 * New! Etherpad-lite, a really-real time collaborative editor.
 * Localisation support for MediaWiki extensions still remaining in Subversion was dropped. This affected about three hundred extensions that were generally ill maintained.

Interface changes imminent
Since the previous newsletter we have switched to the newer embedded translation editor, compared to the previous pop-up translation editor. Functionality hasn't changed. More changes are coming soon, when the Wikimedia Language Engineering team starts working on the Translation UX project in December. The roadmap predicts significant improvements to the translation process, search, and the signup process. We will be using dark launches and sometimes keep the older interface around for comparison, so that you can beta test, or not switch immediately if you don't want to. Eventually, the old user interfaces will be replaced.

A new front page design has been proposed during the Wikimedia Devcamp Bangalore 2012.

Did you know: You can also open the translation editor by double clicking the message table row.

Translation Rally August 2012: Huge success
The Translation Rally of August 2012 was a huge success. This rally was sponsored by Wikimedia Nederland, the Dutch Wikimedia chapter. We are very grateful for their wonderful continued support!

188 translators made almost 66,000 new in-scope translations during 9 days of rally for 115 languages. 54 contributors qualified for a cut of the 1,000 € bounty. For those interested, all details are available.

Behind the scenes
We are very aware that site performance matters a lot. In a process of moving the translatewiki.net configuration to Puppet configuration management system we have upgraded our webserver to nginx, which solves the long standing HTTPS problems and is more robust than the lighttpd based setup we had before. We are currently working on enabling IPv6 support.

Lots of efforts have been made to keep the site performance at acceptable levels. Additionally we have made efforts to further automate the updating, processing and exporting of supported products, to reduce the amount of maintainer time for products. Currently about 45 minutes per week is needed to make updates and exports for all supported products but MediaWiki core and extensions. The latter is being taken care of on a daily basis by Raimond Spekking, who is just awesome. Make sure to thank him if you meet him!

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.

More detailed news can be found on our News page. Follow translatewiki on Twitter for the latest news.

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

Finally, of our about 8,000 registered users, only 4,300 people are registered as translator. 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!

Siebrand Mazeland

translatewiki.net staff

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