Thanks to great amount of changes I've been able do in Weblate during Hackweek, the 1.8 release is quite close.
All features I wanted there are implemented and it is already running for some time on my production servers which look quite stable. The only thing which needs still some improvement are translations. So that's your chance to contribute.
If there won't be any blocking issue, Weblate 1.8 will be released during next week.
10th hackweek is over and I think it has been again great chance to hack on something. This year we even had better food supplies so interruptions from hacking were even less frequent.
As you've might have already noticed, I was working on Weblate whole week and I think it worked pretty well and I've implemented all what I wanted.
First of all, Weblate now supports login using lot of third party services (like GitHub, Facebook, Google, ...). This was achieved by using python-social-auth for that. It is quite new module for this, so hopefully it's API will stay stable enough to be usable in the long term. It was surprisingly easy to implement, though I've spent quite a lot of tweaking of the login and registration process to make it work according to my expectations.
After doing this quite big change, I thought it's about time to restructure the documentation and document new features in it. I think it now covers all important things, but if you can't find something or some parts are hard to understand, just let me know, I'll fix it.
Another quite big feature (though it won't be much visible in upcoming 1.8 release) is source string tracking. This is prerequisite for many features people have requested in Weblate's issue tracker, but these will have to wait for next releases. If you want to see some feature earlier, you can support it by money on Bountysource :-).
Weblate can now also search in all strings, which might become handy if grepping over dozen of Git repositories is not your favorite game.
And last but not least, I've implemented simple Captcha protection for new registrations as the demo server is full of bots who register there and do nothing afterward.
Basically I think this makes Weblate 1.8 feature complete and I'd like to stabilize it in upcoming weeks to release. Right now it is deployed on the demo server, where you can play with it and discover bugs :-). Also it's now time to work on Weblate translations!
First day of hackweek did not really go as planned. I had to spend too much time on tasks which I did not now I will have to do in advance.
I've started with releasing Weblate 1.7. As a part of that I update SUSE Studio images with Weblate. Unfortunately this turned out to be more challenging than usual as with new version the build script always failed but without any obvious error. After some time, I've realized that it just does not show whole output, so the last (and most important) lines are missing.
Then it was easy to spot that the problem is in Whoosh version and it's just matter of providing newer version.
After fixing the image, I could finally focus on Weblate's issue tracker and resolved few issues and questions. I've also improved some of the in application documentation and links to documentation or other resources.
Meanwhile I could also setup translation hosting for monkeysign, happy translating!
Weblate 1.7 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially in translation speed and many new features.
Full list of changes for 1.7:
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. Ready to run appliances will be soon available in SUSE Studio Gallery.
Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.
If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you.
Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far!
Weblate, a free web-based translation management system, of course also needs to be translated. Now it's right time to complete translation into your language before Weblate 1.7 will be released.
The release is currently planned on Monday, to have clean table before hacking on Weblate during Hackweek. There is not much time left so jump in right now and start translating :-).
The amount of projects using Hosted Weblate grows every month so it seems like there is quite interest in that. This growth will however bring some challenges in the future.
Currently everything is managed by myself and that really does not scale well. There should be some automation in the process of adding new projects and there should be more control given to project admins, so that they can change some things on them own. This is quite some coding, but there is another Hackweek on the way, so my plan is to implement at least something in this area as well.
Other side is unsurprisingly money - even though I just got new hardware to run this service (which will be hopefully deployed in a month or so), in the long term it might need other investments as well. That's why I've rewritten the donation page for Weblate and added some more options.
Most importantly the goal is now to get some regular income which would allow sustainable development of both Weblate and free hosting service. I think Gittip is great service for such goal, so let's see how it works.
Finally, Weblate 1.6 is available as ready to use appliance in SUSE Studio.
This took quite long as openSUSE 12.3 does not work as expected inside SUSE Studio and I was too lazy to find all necessary tweaks earlier. The same problem actually prevented from Weblate 1.5 being there at all.
The biggest obstacle was MySQL setup - after enabling "Set up MySQL" in studio, you end up with MySQL database with empty mysql.users table, which obviously can not authenticate anybody. As I've found out, the only way around is manual setup.
Once this was figured out, the appliance only needed minor tweaking and is now ready to use in SUSE Gallery in all formats used for virtualization.
Weblate 1.5 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements, especially in performance, reporting and support for machine translations.
Full list of changes for 1.5:
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. Ready to run appliances will be soon available in SUSE Studio Gallery.
Weblate is also being used https://l10n.cihar.com/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and others.
If you are free software project which would like to use Weblate, I'm happy to help you with set up or even host Weblate for you.
Hackweek 9 is over and it's time to share what I've done on Weblate during that.
I think everything went quite well and Weblate is now ready for 1.5 release. I'm slowly deploying it on my installations (unfortunately this release migration will need some noticeable downtime for bigger installations) and everything seems to work fine so far. I believe this is possible thanks to massive test coverage - all important code is covered by testcases.
So what you can expect in 1.5 release? The most visible change is probably new machine translation support, providing support for way more backends and allow you to plug in own services as well. The other changes include word counting (what might give you more idea how much work is remaining) or fancy progress bars in all places (they used to be available for translations only).
From the other side, Weblate can now run custom scripts to pre-process translations before commit, what can be used for various things from generating byte compiled files to sorting or cleaning up the translation files.
Also Weblate should be now much faster - there were dozen of optimizations done, leading to much lower press on database server.
If you want to see more detailed work progress, check Hackweek project page or Weblate changelog.
PS: In case no problems appear, Weblate 1.5 should be released on Sunday.
You might have already noticed that there is Hackweek 9 coming next week. At SUSE we will get pizzas, icecream and other nice stuff, but most importantly we can spend the week on hacking anything we want.
Same as last year, I want to spend most of my Hackweek on Weblate, nice crowdsourcing tool for translations. The major goal is to finish 1.5 release, what should not be that hard. The most challenging bits for new machine translation interface are already implemented, and the rest is pretty much only tweaking of existing code.
Another thing we want to explore is possibility of using Weblate for openSUSE translations. Currently they are mostly kept in SVN, what is blocker for using Weblate, but we will see what can be done there.