Transposh - Breaking language barriers

The transposh.org wordpress plugin showcase and support site

Version 0.6.7 – What’s next?

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Image by http://www.flickr.com/photos/crystalflickr/
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.

Version 0.6.6 – Finally! a security release

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By Dmitry Baranovskiy - http://www.flickr.com/photos/dmitry-baranovskiy/
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.

Version 0.6.5 – Now features less bugs

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By fastjack - http://www.flickr.com/photos/fastjack/282707058/
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.

Version 0.6.4 – The shoemaker is no longer barefoot

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Image by Matt Mullenweg
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

Version 0.6.3 – GetText Integration

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By diongillard http://www.flickr.com/photos/diongillard/248190660/in/photostream/
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.