Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Weblate

After releasing Weblate 2.0 with Bootstrap based UI, there was still lot of things to improve. Weblate 2.1 brought more consistency in using buttons with colors and icons. Weblate 2.2 will bring some improvements in other graphics elements.

One of thing which was for quite long in our issue tracker is to provide own renderer for SVG status badge. So far Weblate has offered either PNG badge or external SVG rendered by shields.io. Relying on external service was not good in a long term and also caused requests to third party server on many pages, what could be considered bad privacy wise.

Since this week, Weblate can render SVG badge on it's own and they are also matching current style used by other services (eg. Travis CI):

One last thing which really did not fit into new UI were activity charts. In past they were rendered as PNG on server side, but for upcoming releases we have switched to use Chartist javascript library and render them as SVG on client side. This way we can nicely style them to fit into page, they scale properly and also reduce server load. You can see them in action on Hosted Weblate server:

Weblate 2.1 has been released today. It comes with native Mercurial support, user interface cleanup and various other fixes.

Full list of changes for 2.1:

• Added support for Mercurial repositories.
• Replaced Glyphicon font by Awesome.
• Added icons for social authentication services.
• Better consistency of button colors and icons.
• Documentation improvements.
• Various bugfixes.
• Automatic hiding of columns in translation listing for small screens.
• Changed configuration of filesystem paths.
• Improved SSH keys handling and storage.
• Improved repository locking.
• Customizable quality checks per source string.

You can find more information about Weblate on http://weblate.org, 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://hosted.weblate.org/ 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 has started as a translation system tightly bound to Git version control system. This was in no means design decision, but rather it was the version control I've used. But this has shown not to be sufficient and other systems were requested as well. And Mercurial is first of them to be supported.

Weblate 2.0 already had separated VCS layer and adding another system to that is quite easy if you know the VCS you're adding. Unfortunately this wasn't the case for me with Mercurial as I've never used it for anything more serious than cloning a repository, committing fixes and pushing it back. Weblate needs a bit more than that, especially in regard to remote branches. But nevertheless I've figured out all operations and the implementation is ready in our Git.

In case somebody is interested in adding support for another version control, patches are always welcome!

Weblate 2.0 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements in backend and completely new user interface.

Full list of changes for 2.0:

• New responsive UI using Bootstrap.
• Rewritten VCS backend.
• Documentation improvements.
• Added whiteboard for site wide messages.
• Configurable strings priority.
• Added support for JSON file format.
• Fixed generating mo files in certain cases.
• Added support for GitLab notifications.
• Added support for disabling translation suggestions.
• Django 1.7 support.
• ACL projects now have user management.
• Extended search possibilites.
• Give more hints to translators about plurals.
• Fixed Git repository locking.
• Compatibility with older Git versions.
• Improved ACL support.
• Added buttons for per language quotes and other special chars.
• Support for exporting stats as JSONP.

You can find more information about Weblate on http://weblate.org, 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://hosted.weblate.org/ 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!

The biggest part of this HackWeek will be spent on Weblate. The major task is to complete new UI for it. There have been already some blog posts about that here, so regular readers of my blog already know it is using Twitter Bootstrap.

Today it has reached point where I think it's good enough for wider testing and I've deployed it at Hosted Weblate (see Weblate website for conditions for getting hosting there).

I expect there will be some rough edges, so don't hesitate to report any issues, so that I can quickly fix them.

For quite some time, I've been running translation server for projects where I am involved at l10n.cihar.com. Historically this used Pootle, but when we had more and more problems with that, I've written Weblate and started to use it there.

As Weblate become more popular and I got requests to help people with running it, I've realized that it might be good idea to run server where I could host translations for other projects. This is when Hosted Weblate was born.

After some time, I've realized that it really makes little sense to run and maintain separate servers for these sets of projects, so I've decided to move all translations from l10n.cihar.com to hosted.weblate.org. Today this move was completed by moving translations for phpMyAdmin.

For quite some time, I'm working on new UI for Weblate. As the time is always limited, the progress is not that fast as I would like to see, but I think it's time to show the current status to wider audience.

Almost all pages have been rewritten, the major missing parts are zen mode and source strings review. So it's time to play with it on our demo server. The UI is responsive, so it works more or less on different screen sizes, though I really don't expect people to translate on mobile phone, so not much tweaking was done for small resolutions.

Anyway I'd like to hear as much feedback as possible :-).

For quite some time I was pretty confident that Weblate will need some UI rewrite at some point. This is always problematic thing for me as I'm no way an UI designer and thus I always hope that somebody else will do that. I've anyway spent few hours on train home from LinuxTag to check what I could do with that.

The first choice for me was to try Twitter Bootstrap as I've quite good experience with using that for UI at work, so I hoped it will work quite well for Weblate as well. The first steps went quite nicely, so I could share first screenshots on Twitter and continue to work on that.

After few days, I'm quite happy with basic parts of the interface, though the most important things (eg. the page for translating) are still missing. But I think it's good time to ask for initial feedback on that.

Main motivation was to unite two tab layout used on main pages, which turned out to be quite confusing as most users did not really get into bottom page of the page and thus did not find important functions available there. So all functions are accessible from top page navigation, either directly or being in menu.

I've also decide to use colors a bit more to indicate the important things. So the progress bars are more visible now (and the same progress bar now indicates status of translation per words). The quality checks also got their severity, which in turn is used to highlight the most critical ones. The theme will probably change a bit (so far it's using default theme as I did not care much to change that).

So let's take a look at following screenshot and let me know your thoughts:

You can also try that yourself, everything is developed in the bootstrap branch in our Git repository.

Weblate 1.9 has been released today. It comes with lot of improvements and bug fixes and with experimental Zen mode for editing translations.

Full list of changes for 1.9:

• Django 1.6 compatibility.
• No longer maintained compatibility with Django 1.4.
• Management commands for locking/unlocking translations.
• Improved support for Qt TS files.
• Users can now delete their account.
• Avatars can be disabled.
• Merged first and last name attributes.
• Avatars are now fetched and cached server side.
• Added support for shields.io badge.

You can find more information about Weblate on http://weblate.org, 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!

Together with many phpMyAdmin guys, I'm traveling to LinuxTag 2014 in few days. We'll have a booth there (hall 6, booth A13), where we will show some demos and you can stop by and chat with us.

Of course my presence there will not be just about phpMyAdmin, I'll meet there few Weblate users and developers, but if you have anything else to discuss, just stop by, I'll be usually around the booth.