Transposh - Breaking language barriers

The transposh.org wordpress plugin showcase and support site

Version 0.6.2 – Lots of small candies

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Original: http://flickr.com/photos/51035611977@N01/11760819
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!

Version 0.6.1 – Buddypress deeper integration

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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.

Version 0.6.0 – Going from fast to faster

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Image by Nathan Eal Photography
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.

Version 0.5.7 – Pluggable widgets

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Octopus by Dr. Dwayne Meadows, NOAA/NMFS/OPR
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.

Version 0.5.5 – Buddypress Support

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Did you arm your vuvuzelas yet for the wordpress 3.0 release? Now you can do that and enjoy the fact that the latest transposh plugin for wordpress offers support for the new wordpress, and as a bonus, support for buddypress. This support for buddypress now means that urls generated and answered by it will now be translatable.

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.