Michal Čihař - Archive for 3/2012

You have probably noticed that phpMyAdmin is again participating in Google Summer of Code 2012. This year we don't want to bring dozens of new features like we did in past year, but rather to improve quality and maintainability of existing code. This is all in sync with our plan for phpMyAdmin 4.0.

So if you are student interested in improving phpMyAdmin and have knowledge of PHP (especially with some refactoring experiences), you would be welcome to join us. More information is available in our applicant guide.

PS: Please note that for removal of frames we already have few applications right now, so you might want to focus some other parts to have higher chance to get accepted.

One of features I wanted to introduce with Weblate is ability to do some quality checks while translating. We want contributors to have easy access to translating, but still we need to ensure some quality of translations. That's why Weblate comes with set of quality checks which are performed on every translation unit. The current set of checks (see documentation) is pretty basic and more might be easily added in the future pretty easily.

There are two ways how checks are used in Weblate. During translating, if any of checks fires, translator stays on current translation with warning that something might be wrong. This is not a hard error as he still can be correct, but should at least prevent accidental mistakes like corrupted format strings or missing trailing colon.

The other way is to do review of a translation. Failing checks are shown on each translation page or you can browse them by project to give you overview what can be wrong.

For example with phpMyAdmin this helped me discover that there were few languages where almost half of translated strings are actually not translated but simply copied from English. There were also other problems like inconsistent translations across branches. All in all using these features helped me to improve quality of translations in phpMyAdmin quite a lot and I hope we will keep it for the future.

phpMyAdmin 3.5 should be released on April 7, 2012, so let's again look at translations status. Here comes sixth round of translation status update.

Since last update we have two more translations summing up to 11 translations at 100%:

• Czech
• English (Great Britain)
• Estonian
• French
• Greek
• Japanese
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

There are few which are really close to 100% and I hope they will get there soon:

• Chinese
• Danish
• Dutch
• German
• Italian
• Polish

As you can see, there is still lot of languages missing, this might be your opportunity to contribute to phpMyAdmin. Also you are welcome to translate phpMyAdmin 3.5 using translation server.

There were no big updates from me on Weblate this week. I decided to settle down a bit and focus on bringing it close to 1.0 release. I plan to release 0.8 in one or two weeks, which should include all features. After it receives some testing and bug fixes, 0.9 will be released and if no major problems occur 1.0 will follow shortly.

Right now most of the core for all features is prepared, just some user interface is missing for most of them. The 0.8 release will come with rewritten full text search (now is based on Whoosh), changes tracking (for possible review of changes made by others) and built in dictionary for frequently used terms. Along with these changes there are smaller ones as well like improvements to various consistency checks, cleaned up translate page or faster loading of translation services.

Anyway if you feel something is done wrongly, it is now last chance to complain so that it is possible to do some bigger change for 1.0 release.

Continuing at same pace (one release every two days), I can announce Weblate 0.7. The major change is built in full text search and displaying of context for currently translated message (either based on location in po file or by string similarity based on full text data).

Full list of changes for 0.7:

• Direct support for GitHub notifications.
• Added support for cleaning up orphaned checks and translations.
• Displays nearby strings while translating.
• Displays similar strings while translating.
• Improved searching for string.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user.

Weblate is now also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.

Continuing with fast release pace for Weblate, I've just released version 0.6. It brings few bug fixes adds quality checks for translations and configurable access control.

Full list of changes for 0.6:

• Added various checks for translated messages.
• Tunable access control.
• Improved handling of translations with new lines.
• Added client side sorting of tables.
• Please check upgrading instructions in case you are upgrading.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user.

Weblate is now also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.

We're heading towards final phpMyAdmin 3.5, so let's again look at translations status. Here comes fifth round of translation status update.

Since last update we one less translation (it was not really complete, the po file missed few strings) at 100%:

• Czech
• English (Great Britain)
• French
• Japanese
• Russian
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

There are few which are really close to 100% and I hope they will get there soon:

• Danish
• Dutch
• Estonian
• Italian
• Polish

As you can see, there is still lot of languages missing, this might be your opportunity to contribute to phpMyAdmin. Also you are welcome to translate phpMyAdmin 3.5 using new translation server.

Continuing with fast release pace for Weblate, I've just released version 0.5. It brings lot of bug fixes (thanks for everybody who has provided feedback), lot of new translations (thanks to translators) and as a special bonus it can use few machine translation services.

Full list of changes for 0.5:

• Support for machine translation using following online services:
  • Apertium
  • Microsoft Translator
  • MyMemory
• Several new translations.
• Improved merging of upstream changes.
• Better handle concurrent git pull and translation.
• Propagating works for fuzzy changes as well.
• Propagating works also for file upload.
• Fixed file downloads while using FastCGI (and possibly others).

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user.

Weblate is now also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.

Yesterday, I've finalized Weblate 0.4. It improved handling of plural strings, added documentation and implemented support for secondary languages. If you ask for 0.3, well I managed to release two versions in the day, but I expect to slow down this pace.

Full list of changes for 0.3:

• Better display of source for plural translations.
• New documentation in Sphinx format.
• Displays secondary languages while translating.
• Improved error page to give list of existing projects.
• New per language stats.

Full list of changes for 0.4:

• Added usage guide to documentation.
• Fixed API hooks not to require CSRF protection.

You can find more information about Weblate on it's website, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. You can login there with demo account using demo password or register your own user.

Weblate is now also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu and others.

I've just switched https://l10n.cihar.com/ to Weblate as I think it's stable enough to replace Pootle installation there. This change immediately affects translation of all projects which were done there - phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Wammu, GePeS or Ukolovnik. In addition Weblate itself is also being translated there.

Your old usernames and passwords should be valid (in case you've activated the account and used it in last year), but you might want to adjust your profile as the settings were intentionally not imported (many users had corrupted name in Pootle and hope this will let them fix it).

Let's see how many bugs will this switch reveal, but I expect it will work quite smoothly.