Transposh - Breaking language barriers

The transposh.org wordpress plugin showcase and support site

Version 0.8.2 – 3 years, 66 languages, 1 wordpress

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I said 3 candles on that cake!

It has been three years (and three days, and thirty three hours) since the first version of Transposh plugin has been aired on the wordpress.org plugin repository.

Time surely flies.

This has been the first leap year (29th February) and a real leap year for Transposh. The plugin has been downloaded from the repository over 50,000 times this year and has made a steady growth of features and total number of languages supported. And today with the addition of Hmong Daw we are the first plugin to support a total number of 66 languages.

This was a really interesting (as in, have an interesting life) year for the automatic translation industry and plugins, where Google has nearly dropped their API support (only to switch to a pay model) while Bing imposed new limits. Transposh has successfully overcame those changes, while other plugins did not survive.

What does the future holds for Transposh? We are slowly boiling some new stuff, working on our vision to improve website translation, when things will be ready – they will be out. Meanwhile, your continued support is important to us, sometimes a simple email with “your plugin is great” drives us to continue. So if you believe we are doing well, drop us a line, if you think we should improve things, drop us a note, and if you think that we suck, we fail to understand why you have read this message up to this point 😉

Wishing ourselves a great 4th year, maybe it will end with a bigger cake 🙂

 

Version 0.8.1 – It’s not a bug! it’s a feature!

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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
We hope you’ll enjoy this version

Version 0.8.0 – Attack of the APIs

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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.

Version 0.7.6 – Keep on rolling

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attribution: http://www.flickr.com/photos/aidanmorgan/3705621971/sizes/l/in/photostream/
Keeping on rolling

We are happy to present you all with our newest wordpress plugin release. This is a rolling release that does not include any major changes or something that is too groundbreaking. So we’ll just walk over the changelog and explain the news.

  • We have imported some improvements to the simple html dom which serves as the base to our parser from a new upstream release, not much news here
  • Allow setting of a post/page language with a simple select box. This is not a new feature, as this could have been handled in the past my adding the tp_language meta to the posts manually, however it does simplify the process, and it also make sure that translate default language is turned on so that the feature will actually work.
  • Warn about some conditions that we can’t fix and a user should probably be aware of. Currently there are two condition we notify about, which are the ones that made most of our support questions to date. First we warn about low memory conditions, and we urge people to increase their php memory limit (or switch to a decent hosting service). The second warning is about the lack of APC or similar which can improve the performance dramatically (again, switch to better hosting!). The warnings can be safely removed by pressing the small X symbol and the side which will assure that you won’t see those warnings in the near future.
  • Allow collecting of anonymized statisics upon user consent. Please please allow us to gather some data! we really want some vanity statistics like we are running on 1 zillion sites and are translating a gazillion pages per second!
  • Fixed some minor warning notices reported by users. No longer will your logs be clogged after removing our ads!
We have also revised the FAQ page, maybe we will avoid some repeating questions, or we’ll be able to tell users to read the FAQs for that…
Also – it is now easier than ever to show your everlasting support of this project by using the social buttons on the side, it does not cost you anything (maybe besides losing all your friends, fame and glory on facebook) so just do it!
We hope that you will enjoy this version, and would (like always) be happy to read your comments.

Version 0.7.5 – The longest day ++

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by voobie http://www.flickr.com/photos/vinish/960942349/
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.