When APIs fight

Well ahead of the deadline posed by Google Translate API to stop working, we were finally able to compile this new release. This one followed a long period of problems that were presented by the older version, mainly because of the fact that Google decided to pose limitations on usage before their deadline which caused the previous versions support requests to surge to new heights. The Google change also triggered an API limit in the Bing translation API, since users were switching engines, which overloaded the Transposh hard coded API key for Bing.

However, we survived this period to provide you with our latest and greatest version. This version fixes these problems be providing a bypass (Proxy for Google and temp keys for MSN) and it also allows you to use your own key directly (thanks to Randy from spyware help center for providing us with his key for testing) which will take precedence over those other methods. While doing this we were able to dramatically improve the infrastructure of the plugin, changing the way AJAX calls were performed to a method that is native to WordPress  (e.g. if your admin page works, it should probably work as well). While doing that we were able to reduce javascript code needed for the backend while allowing the translate all feature to work much faster (and supporting Apertium too!).

At this point we had a solid version, which seemed like a good thing to release, but no, we had to have some other features in, so we finally decided to tackle the issue of multiple widgets support (and title selection too, yippee!). Seems quite straight forward? but no, this caused a major rewrite of our widget infrastructure as well. Actually improving it quite drastically with changing the way css was added, and the way the widgets notified the servers of change in language (we now avoid a useless POST call to the server). While writing that we were lucky enough to stumble upon a PHP5.3 to PHP5.2 incompatibility issue with a set of other problems which held our release back another week. We want to thank the many users that have put up with our beta releases and helped us find problems that were hidden under layers of code and complexity.

We also took this opportunity to change our terms slightly, if you are displaying Google ads from AdSense on your translated pages, we will take 1/1000 of that space for use with our own adsense code, so if Transposh is helping you generate a revenue of $10K you will be buying us coffee! So thanks! To clarify things a bit, we don’t create additional ad space on your page, and we won’t insert any ads or change your layout, if you have no ads, we do nothing. If you think that this is asking too much, you may simply delete our plugin, whistle a soft tune, and be on your way. If you want a commercial license, we don’t sell them yet, but they’ll probably cost more.

Other changes to this version include:

•  Added Catalan and Hindi support for Bing – speaks for itself.
•  Dropdown widget improved css – it actually looks much better now.
•  Support for Memcached – if APC and other opcode caches were too much for you, now you may use memcached and have a lot of fun.
•  Better 404 page handling (don’t create new links to non-existing pages) – meaning the google crawler will hassle your site less.
•  Fix caching on rackspace cloudsites – they had x-cache installed for opcode cache, but with no user memory, which caused a surge in logfiles – now fixed.
•  Many more minor fixes – We might count those, but we don’t have enough fingers.
•  Turkish Translation by Semih Yeşilyurt.

We hope you’ll enjoy this version, and as always, waiting for your comments, ideas, suggestions and flames.

P.S – Tested on WordPress 3.3 beta4, works great.

Matt and Me

This time we are joined by nobody else than Matt Mullenweg, the creator of the WordPress platform.

In the following completely fake interview, Matt will help us all understand what is new in 0.6.4:

Ofer: Hello Matt, how are you today?
Matt: I have never been so excited about a point 0.01 release of a plugin before!
Ofer: Why is that?
Matt: I think that you are finally getting the spirit of wordpress in this release
Ofer: Am I?
Matt: Yes, you are finally integrating with the platform instead of hacking around it, I really like the fact that you finally took the time and made your plugin interface and administration pages translatable, and since you are that good, you get a free blog!
Ofer: Gee, thanks! now how will I get other people to make translations of my plugin?
Matt: Just ask your users to do that, I am sure you’ll give them credit.
Ofer: Tell them the whole thing about poedit and stuff?
Matt: Come on, as I am always saying, there’s a plugin for that! And you should probably know since you translated it yourself and contributed some minor fixes.
Ofer: You mean codestyling localization?
Matt: Yes, that’s the one, anyone can use it. But I have a question for you
Ofer: For me?
Matt: Yes, why didn’t you use Transposh for doing that?
Ofer: Didn’t really see the reason, as there’s already a great plugin for it, why replicate?
Matt: I see that you are finally getting it.
Ofer: Getting what?
Matt: The spirit of wordpress, sharing, caring, open source, and free love.
Ofer: I sure hope so, thank you so much for being with us.
Matt: Thank you, next time, please interview me on a major feature, if I had to do fake interviews for every minor plugin release in wordpress, I’ll never have free time to actually improve wordpress and come to wordcamps.
Ofer: Will take notice, thanks again!

Well, thanks Matt for joining us, some features also added to this version is the Latin translation added (with google translation support), three new languages added to Bing translate. The ability to disable the gettext integration where it causes problems, with some other fixes.

As always – we hope you will enjoy this version

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.

We hope you’ll enjoy this one as much as we do.

A new build system that we deployed in the development environment actually means that it will be easier to release the upcoming versions, and that they’ll be kept in sync with the source code repository.

If you want to know more about who we are and our future directions, Marco from Technology inside blog have conducted an interview with our own Ofer Wald. Nice piece of reading for anyone who’s interested and we would like to thank Marco for his patience and hard work.

Click here to read this (in English)

The results it gives are quite different from the ones you get from Google translate, sometimes better, sometimes worse.

A minor setback for default activation is that this service is still in beta and an invite is required, We have a very small amount we can share so if you want one, just comment on this post, first comes – first served basis.

Also – we haven’t activated Bing translator as a default automatic translator yet and we would like to hear your opinions on that. If enough people request this feature, we will put more effort into enable this in the coming release. In the meanwhile – you are welcomed to test this feature on this site, just start translating and use the Bing suggest button.