I said 3 candles on that cake!

It has been three years (and three days, and thirty three hours) since the first version of Transposh plugin has been aired on the wordpress.org plugin repository.

Time surely flies.

This has been the first leap year (29th February) and a real leap year for Transposh. The plugin has been downloaded from the repository over 50,000 times this year and has made a steady growth of features and  total number of languages supported. And today with the addition of Hmong Daw we are the first plugin to support a total number of 66 languages.

This was a really interesting (as in, have an interesting life) year for the automatic translation industry and plugins, where Google has nearly dropped their API support (only to switch to a pay model) while Bing imposed new limits. Transposh has successfully overcame those changes, while other plugins did not survive.

What does the future holds for Transposh? We are slowly boiling some new stuff, working on our vision to improve website translation, when things will be ready – they will be out. Meanwhile, your continued support is important to us, sometimes a simple email with “your plugin is great” drives us to continue. So if you believe we are doing well, drop us a line, if you think we should improve things, drop us a note, and if you think that we suck, we fail to understand why you have read this message up to this point

Wishing ourselves a great 4th year, maybe it will end with a bigger cake

Anybody guess what the spring stands for?

This release comes in a bit late on our schedule. But it already broke our single day download record by crossing the 500 mark.

This release although small in nature does have some nice additions.

First,  the default language set in Transposh now overrides the one that is set in the WP_LANG constant, this allows a WordPress MU installation in which every site can be managed in a different language on the backend. A feature which I enjoyed by finally allowing my kid to have his own personal blog in a language he can manage.

We have added a tp shortcode that enables to output the current transposh language, although it might not sound like much, this small additions allows displaying different images for different languages, you can read about it here.

An addition of a few constants in our parser code, now allow coders (not users) to change our parser behavior to break phrases on larger chunks, see the top of  our parser.php for documentation.

More changes and bug crashing include:

• Iframes included inside pages will now attempt to include proper language
• Fixed bug with using the only=”y” parameter of the tp shortcode which made incorrect detections of source language further in parsing
• Added German translation by Jenny Beelens from professionaltranslation.com

Enjoy this version, tell your friends about it, don’t tell your enemies anything, consult with your lawyers if you really want to and don’t forget the importance of your family.

PS: We know about the scheduled Google Translate API deprecation and the plugin will still work, details will be uncovered in future versions.

Today we have released version 0.7.3 which adds support for shortcodes inside wordpress posts, this can be used to do some neat stuff and for which we have created the video above, so if you have five minutes free and nothing better to do, just watch the video. Otherwise we would recommand reading the documentation at http://trac.transposh.org/wiki/ShortCodes.

Some more bug fixes were added to this release, mainly reducing the load (and duplications) that bots might create on edit pages, and eliminate unneeded session files for bots.

Enjoy this version!

Happy second birthday for the plugin

We have just released version 0.7.2 with a few bug fixes and three added translations to the plugin.

• Italian translation by Marco Rossi
• Persian translation by Sushyant Zavarzadeh
• Spanish translation by Angel Torregrosa

Two years (and a day) have passed since version 0.0.1 was released and one year since version 0.4.3 was released. In this year we had over 32,000 downloads in comparison to 13,000 in the year before, and we have more features and a bit more grown up product.

We wanted to celebrate this day with the release of the proxy service, but unfortunately this will be delayed a bit, however – the dedicated 24GB ram server is finally up (hosting this site) and we will soon be ready to rumble. Looking forward to your ideas, suggestions, kind words and anything you might want to throw at us.

Team Transposh.

Release train keeps rolling

Work on transposh is commencing at full speed, and when a new version is reaching a stable state we attempt to release it to the masses for general consumption. This minor version does not bring any new major features but it does go to fix some points that needed attention.
So without further ado, lets review the changes:

• Two language translations to the plugin were added, Dutch with the help of Roland Nieuwendijk and Russian with the help of Romans Matusevics. If you want to help, just contact us and get our eternal gratitude (and credits)
• Marking of excerpts were fixed for tp_language posts
• Dramatically reduce number of database queries on translatable urls (from thousands to one)
• Fix for automatic translation when anonymous translation is not supported on non google engines
• Fix buddypress (and hopefully other) redirections on single activities pages and other double redirected pages
• Fix for regression with after post translation and translate all

We hope you’ll enjoy this version, and we are waiting for your comments and feedback.

GetText makes translation easier

This new version has two major changes and lots of bug fixes included.

The most important change is the integration of the plugin with the WordPress GetText system, which is the way WordPress (and some themes and plugins) provide localized versions of themselves. This is done with a couple of files (called .po/.mo files because of their extensions) that includes a list of translated strings that that software include.

What Transposh now does is to utilize said files, so if you have the files that translate WordPress to Spanish, they will take precedence and Transposh will use the files to make the translation of the interface to Spanish. Why is this better? there are a few reasons, one is that sometimes it enables translations where they were previously impossible, another is that the translation is human based and deemed more accurate, and the last is that it can clear ambiguity especially in short strings such as month names and day abbreviations.
How to get the .po/.mo files, and more information about how this work can be found at http://trac.transposh.org/wiki/UsingGetText.

This feature also includes a rewrite of the in-memory caching system of the plugin, which now supports xcache and eaccelarator in addition to the previous versions APC support. This version uses a more compact representation of the data which improves performance and reduce memory usage.

More fixes in this version:

• Tags from the tag cloud will now be translated with mass translate
• Fix for the sneaky “not a valid plugin header” issue, if you get “Default” listed twice in your widget selection settings, please delete the widgets/tpw_deafult.php file
• Fix for MS translate tendency to add an extra space to translation result
• Fixed bug with list with flags css widget preventing the view of flags

We have also changed this site layout a bit so you can see the development feed and changes in a more real time fashion.

Waiting for your feedbacks on this version.

Update: A bug was discovered when using the plugin without caching, if you have repeat translations, or you can’t see translations previously made, please reinstall the plugin from wordpress.org, the plugin there is now fixed. Thanks Nicholas for reporting this.

More changes include additional support for conditions that made the UI unworkable, when for example jQuery tools was used with some plugin or theme, now – we are able to make it work.

Like previously since a new major version of wordpress is out, we are dropping official support for the older wordpress 2.8 version, the plugin should still function but it will not be tested and patched for that version and we recommend that you upgrade.

As always – we want to hear you out, what features you want? and which team will win the world cup?  just drop your comments here.

However – take the note, bugs opened on our trac (trac.transposh.org) are the ones that we are able to resolve fastest.

Enjoy this version and let us know what you think.

There are also further improvements included such as the fact that comments made at languages that are different than the default one are marked as such and become translatable at the default language (you need to mark the translate default language option in the settings), better support for wordpress super cache plugin, and a small upgrade in the jQueryUI version used that helps with wordpress 3.0 coming support.

Last item on this notice agenda is that we want you to know that we have a page on our development site where we maintain third party plugins compatibility list (with patches if required). On our wiki plugin support matrix page, as its a wiki, just create a user on the site and feel free to edit and improve this.

Thanks everyone!