Support for 5 more Indic languages

One day after summer has officially begun in the northern hemisphere, we are proud to present version 0.7.5 of our plugin. This version adds support for the new languages that were announced as supported today by Google Translate - Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Tamil and Telugu.

Before rushing to add those languages to your blog, please be reminded that those languages use an ajax proxy in order to work correctly, which means that they create a load on your server upon the first encounter with a new translation string (forcing it to fetch the translation from Google). So the choice is yours, but you have been notified…

Further more this version adds the option not to override the default locale with Transposh’s default language, this behavior (new on 0.7.4) allowed MU users to have admin pages in their language, but on the other hand annoyed users that wanted to manage the site in a language different than their default, so now this is configurable.

We have also improved the translation UI, the next and previous buttons now save changes done, and the dialog will not be re-centered upon clicking these buttons.

We hope you’ll enjoy this version.

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.

What's next for Transposh?

Yesterday we have released version 0.6.7. This version includes a few minor fixes, both for the ability to translate more phrases when google  does not detect the source language correctly, and for the ability to include direct links to static files (those will cause a 301 redirect to occur).

However what is more important is that we have finally been able to cleanup our milestones, and set the gears in full motion for the next major version of Transposh – which will be 0.7. The focus of this version will be a major improvement to the translator frontend interface, and we have put the requirements for this online in our development site at http://trac.transposh.org/wiki/milestones/0.7. Everyone that wants to influence the next version is welcomed to edit and comment on that wiki page or create a ticket for us. We will review each request and try to fit it into the schedule.

On some other news, we would like to thank Colnect, our new sponsor for contributing a new vps for Transposh which will hopefully make the site go a bit faster. We have also attempted to use cloudflare to improve our service, however we are having mixed results with that, so if you are having any problems accessing this site, please let us know.

Last on the agenda, an alpha version of our plugin for blogger is on the works, if you have a site on blogger and want to add translation to it, just contact us.

Cross Site Scripting -> XSS

We would like to thank Joshua Hansen and Scott Caveza for their help in identifying and helping us debug two XSS vulnerabilities that had the potential to effect users using internet explorer browser with versions lower than 8, or when xss protection was explicitly off. We avoided the urge to call this version 0.6.6.6 and resumed the regular naming policies. Those vulnerabilities don’t pose any risk to webmasters or hosters using Transposh, but to users that might trust scripts from these sites by using the sneaky XSS method.

This release also bundles two other changes that were already committed and would have probably waited for a later release otherwise, the first being a small improvement to the parser, enabling support for some more html “breaker entities” such as ’  which were created by software trying to outsmart the user, we would like to thank archon810 on his help in this bug report.

Last but not least is a change in the support for Google Sitemaps XML generator, the patch has one letter removed in order to have proper support for php5.3, and on other good news, the coming version 4 of this plugin has support already built in, this version also helps in breaking the 50k url limits that some users had. So we would to thank Arne Brachhold on his great work on this project.

So everybody, go and upgrade! just because finding an image to match this post was such a difficult fit.

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.

Buddypress, want to be buddies?

This version has a mix of new features and a couple of bug fixes for all the family, most notable is the addition of deeper buddypress support which introduces support for activity stream in different languages. This means that when a user comments on a post using a different version than the original one – the activity stream will be properly translated (given you set translate default language). The stream will also show translations made by logged in users. We now also have a group for the plugins users on the buddypress site at http://buddypress.org/community/groups/transposh-translation-filter-for-wordpress so if you use both and love them, you have the place to show this love, if you hate them and go there you will have our pity.

Another feature which we added thanks to Yoav’s presentation is the support for RTL themes which actually have RTL support built in (such as twenty ten, and the buddypress default theme). Your Hebrew, Arabic, Farsi, Urdu and Yiddish users will be so happy they will make world peace so fast and stop making nukes and gefiltes.

Other fixes include

• Fix for ms translate and non latin characters (ooops)
• Fix rewrite urls and url translation issue when using custom structure (eg. when suffixed with .html) (thanks claudio)
• Auto translation will not work in edit mode if auto translation is set to off (another oops)

Hope you’ll enjoy this release as much as we do.

was fast but now faster

This version is a major release, and there is lots of new stuff in this release. so lets get over the list of items

• Now there is support for auto batch translations which makes translations faster and improves user experience, previously Transposh has to load scripts from the various auto translation backends and then it would iterate on the phrases one by one to get translations, now those are grouped together for reducing the numbers of requests made, the fact that no external scripts are loading reduces complexity and improves speed.
• MSN (bing) translator does no longer require a key, as they have upgrades their API and switched to using an application key, you can now just select the default translation engine at will, if this engine is not available for that language – Transposh will resort to using the other one.
• Transposh Google Proxy is now included to enable translation for Alpha level languages from Google (with 5 new languages supported – Armenian, Azerbaijani, Basque, Georgian and Urdu) – this proxy is located inside the plugin and redirects requests to google translate from your server allowing the script to use them. This process is slow – it increases the load on your server – and is generally not very recommended, and will be eliminated as soon as Google releases those languages to general consumption. But if you have the urgent need to translate your site to the Azeri people, at least you can do that.
• The Transposh logo and backlink can now be removed from the widget, if you choose this option – Transposh will attempt to make some money of existing ad space on your translated pages only, this money will help us in our development effort, if you don’t want to lose any money from your ads, just keep the link. The terms are readable here.
• The translate all button was also revamped, and should be much faster using batching.

The usual share of bug fixes is here, and I would like to thank Rogelio and Marko for their insightful comments and contribution to fixing those bugs. An attempt was made at the plugin header error, but as we can’t reproduce it we don’t know if it works, so crossing our fingers. If this release is badly broken for you, please report this at the comments here, create tickets for us in our trac. Bug us on our twitter account or our facebook page or by calling our cell phones, preferably at 3 am. You can always revert to the previous version, we are not offended.

We hope you’ll enjoy this version.

Paul is being interviewed by Transposh team

We invited Paul the octopus to Transposh for a couple of beers following his latest success in the world cup. We asked him to make a few predictions for us regarding the coming version of Transposh, and since after drinking too much he was really cooperative we had the chance to make an exclusive interview with him.

We first asked him about the new version of Transposh, the one with support for writing your own language widget (want to know how? go to our widget writing guide). He said that as an octopus he really likes things with sockets or things that are pluggable anyhow, so he predicted this feature will be a great success (after seeing the javascript based widget sample). He also gave us a fair warning that if someone misses those ul tags (and know what they meant) they can quickly code their own widget.

After that part he became kinda silent, and reminded us by winking that octopuses can’t really talk. So we decided to go for the two boxes trickery, we put a box with a nice picture of a big, and another one with a picture of a feature (huh?), and we waited for him to open whichever box he saw fit. Naturally he opened the bug box, which we saw as a reason to write the normal warning that bugs might even slip through our testing (even with the help of an eight armed prophet working for us on QA). We also used the opportunity to write a quick guide on how to get a development version for debugging on our wiki.

And last note, whoever wants to give us a hand (or leg), or wants to share his widget creation with the world is more than welcomed to contact us.

Enjoy today’s match, any questions to Paul will be forwarded directly to him.

P.S – usual share of bug fixes are in, fixed a few languages in msn translate and added a few languages to the settings (still not auto translatable – but will soon be)

Update: thanks to a critical bug found in some situations, 0.5.6 was promptly replaced with 0.5.7 thanks for all those who reported this, with special thanks to dgrut.