Hunting bugs with advanced technology

At Transposh we pride ourselves in our high coding standards, this means that we have no bugs in our software. Yes, you have heard this right, zero bugs found. However – there is a slight problem, other people are not like us and they actually do have bugs in their codes. So if you installed Transposh and something is not working correctly, there is probably a bug in WordPress, or a bug in the theme you are you using, or a conflict with another plugin, or jQuery made some mess, or you are still using Internet Explorer 2 or this is something related to your mother, or her mother, or her grandmother, or the first cell that was ever created. It is never us! never ever!

If something is not working and you report it to us, we immediately find someone else to blame, and sometimes, when in good mood, we actually code something to avoid those other people bugs.

This release is one of those releases, the only new feature is the ability to set comment languages in the management interface (if someone posted in Spanish while actually browsing your site in English or vice verse) .

The rest of this release is:

• Enable live human translations backup by default
• Lists of languages used in Javascript are fixed and more readable
• Improved loading for backend javascripts
• Support the ， symbol in parsing (Its not a comma, really!)
• Reintroduce CORS support in our AJAX (Cross Origin Ajax)
• Try to make sure lazyloader loads in the correct context
• Fix calculation of batch translation size to avoid translations too large for Google
• Fix when two jQueryUI versions are included, mainly for wordpress 3.2.x
• Fixed widget to remove [Language] which was buggy as noted by Philip Trauring
• Fix broken sites for users using the widget function directly

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.

Bugs - gotta love them

Version 0.6.5 has focused on squashing some bugs (and a few regressions too).  It is by far the most stable and best software that we have released today. It also adds support to some header magic for search engines.

Lets just review the change log here:

• Fixed Slovenian flag bug reported by anphicle (It was Sierra Leon before that, thanks for the sharp eye!).
• Fixed an issue with the way wordpress handles canonical redirects and url rewritings as reported by Marco, wordpress had no knowledge of the way we translated tag and category prefixed urls and therefore redirected them to the default language url. This fix also improved a canonical form of some URLs.
• Fixed a bug with translate all and after post translation which hindered their ability to work – (thanks nightsurfer [ticket #122]) – we also took the time to improve the handling of passing information to the translate all to use a meta instead of a redirect.
• Fixed json translation for buddypress stream issue – (thanks Inocima [ticket #121]).

We are now working on a cleanup in the our trac system, assigning open tickets to new milestones. Please try to make this effort hopeless by creating new tickets for us as fast as you can.

And as always – 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.

Good things come in small packages

This version includes a relatively large set of small changes, since 0.6.0 was a major release it was quite certain that there would be a few points that will need some ironing, and lots of options to improve the software, bit by bit.

Let’s start with the new stuff!

If you are writing a blog in a few languages, or have writers that prefer writing in one language and others preferring others, it is now possible to mark a complete post as using a different language (We originally thought to write this post in a different language, but decides against it). Marking a post is now done by adding the custom field of tp_language and set it to the language value. Take note that older themes might not be very fund of this and might need to be fixed.

Another feature is the ability to clean-up old automated translations from your database, either completely, or those older than two weeks (ever wanted to comply with google translation caching terms? now you can), This is done in a smart way, where human translations are not deleted, and also automated translations that were replaced by human translations are kept in the translation log for reference. User discretion is advised when using this, and a backup is never a bad idea.

A large change in the code was done to minimize collisions with other plugins, as now all functions and constants migrated into static classes, this type of problems were reported with a few plugins, and should be ok now.

We want to thank Jason, revonorway, Terence, Martin and anyone else who was involved with their help debugging and testing this release.

Now to the list of other changes:

• Fixed typo in buddypress stream
• Allow parser processing of nested lang tags
• Treat the noscript tag as hidden, fixes bug with buddypress
• Fixes to translation regression with non latin characters
• Fixes to mass translate with bing translator for Chinese and Taiwanese
• Shortened copyright notice in source files, and made it a bit more informative

We hope you’ll enjoy this version, if you do and if you don’t, just let us know about it!

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.

We would like to thank Anthony for his help in reporting and debugging those issues as well as for his help with this site translation to Russian.

We also enjoy supporting you and are trying to leave no stones unturned in order to help you, feel free to contact us, and if we haven’t answered within a reasonable period – just contact us again!

We were also asked about donations (twice this week). So first – at this point we don’t accept any money donations (although we appreciate your intentions) but we do accept a few other forms of donations. Donate us time by sending bug reports (and even better, patches ) , spread the knowledge about this plugin by writing something in your blogs or favorite forums, vote for this plugin in the wordpress plugin directory so more people will use it and finally – you can always help us by checking and translating this site to your mother-tongues.

We hope you’ll enjoy this version as much as we do