Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for Weblate

I had some pile of hosting requests in queue since half of January and my recent talk on FOSDEM had some impact on requests for hosting translations as well, so it's about time to process them.

New kids on the block are:

• DSC Auto Rename
• Openbmap / radiocells.org
• Lexica
• Transistor

Second round includes:

• OpenBikeSharing
• Binary Tick Trade App

Unfortunately I had to reject some projects as well mostly due to lack of file format support. This is still the same topic - when translating project, please stick with some standard format. Preferably what is usual on your platform.

If you like this service, you can support it on Bountysource salt or Gratipay. There is also option for hosting translations of commercial products.

It has become almost tradition for me, so yes, I'm attending FOSDEM 2016. It's probably the best conference in Europe to meet other free software guys and that was always motivation for me to come - to see people I meet on mailing lists for rest of the year.

This time it will be slightly different for me - I will be giving talk there for first time. Originally I wanted to do lightning talk only, but in the end I got persuaded and it's full length talk now. It will be in the Coding for Language Communities devroom and you might guess from the devroom topic that it will be about Weblate.

It has been seven years since I've joined SUSE (for second time, but that's different story). As everything has to come to the end, I've decided to make a change in my life and leave safety net of being employed and go for new experience with freelancer life.

This will give me more time to spend on free software projects where I'm involved. Of course I need to earn some money to live, so many decisions about where to spend my time will be backed by money...

First of all I will work on phpMyAdmin, where I was chosen as a contractor (of two for this year). This will be half time job for me and you will see weekly reports in my blog, similar to what Madhura is doing.

Second priority will be Weblate, especially the hosting solution. I believe that this is something what can work quite well in the long term, but the tool needs some development to make it as great as I would like to have it. If you want me to extend hosting for free software projects, you can do it by money :-).

And nobody knows what projects come next. There is some work to be done on Gammu and Wammu, but given that I don't have any recent device to use it, it's sometimes hard to fix the bugs there. Of course this can change if I get some money to work on that.

PS: It's not that SUSE would be bad place to work. It's actually pretty great if you're looking for work with free software. You work there on free software, with great people and you get quite some freedom. As bonus once or twice in a year, there is Hackweek which you can spend on anything. And of course they have lot of open positions :-).

Weblate 2.4 has been released today. It comes with extended support for various file formats, extended hook scripts, better keyboard shortcuts and dozen of bug fixes.

Full list of changes for 2.4:

• Improved support for PHP files.
• Ability to add ACL to anonymous user.
• Improved configurability of import_project command.
• Added CSV dump of history.
• Avoid copy/paste errors with whitespace chars.
• Added support for Bitbucket webhooks.
• Tigher control on fuzzy strings on translation upload.
• Several URLs have changed, you might have to update your bookmarks.
• Hook scripts are executed with VCS root as current directory.
• Hook scripts are executed with environment variables descriping current component.
• Add management command to optimize fulltext index.
• Added support for error reporting to Rollbar.
• Projects now can have multiple owners.
• Project owners can manage themselves.
• Added support for javascript-format used in Gettext PO.
• Support for adding new translations in XLIFF.
• Improved file format autodetection.
• Extended keyboard shortcuts.
• Improved dictionary matching for several languages.
• Improved layout of most of pages.
• Support for adding words to dictionary while translating.
• Added support for filtering languages to be managed by Weblate.
• Added support for translating and importing CSV files.
• Rewritten handling of static files.
• Direct login/registration links to third party service if that's the only one.
• Commit pending changes on account removal.
• Add management command to change site name.
• Add option to confiugure default committer.
• Add hook after adding new translation.
• Add option to specify multiple files to add to commit.

If you are upgrading from older version, please follow our upgrading instructions.

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.

Weblate is also being used https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and other projects.

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!

PS: The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Weblate is not only useful for translating software, it can help in translating any content. Let's look where our users are using it.

Software translation is the most usual use case. This is actually where Weblate was used for first time and still provides great support for that. As an example (and oldest project hosted in Weblate) you can look at phpMyAdmin, where Weblate also helps to keep in sync translation for different maintenance branches. It can also help you in using same terminology in command line utility and graphical one like it is done in Gammu and Wammu translations.

Weblate also supports localization of mobile application. Android support was originally implemented for OsmAnd project, but now they also translate iOS application using Weblate.

Another use case is for translating documentation. You need to have some infrastructure to do, but there are several free software project to help here as well. For phpMyAdmin documentation or documentation for python module Odorik the Sphinx documentation generator is used, which has support for translation of the documentation. I've recently published quick howto for this setup. Another great tool for translating documentation is Publican, it is Docbook based tool and is used for translating The Debian Administrator's Handbook.

Last but not least, you can use Weblate to translate your website. For example website for Weblate itself is translated this way.

Did you miss your use case for Weblate? Please let me know.

PS: I've heard that one Linux distribution will start using Weblate soon.

Up to recently, the only social presence for Weblate was my personal Twitter account. It's time to change that.

You can now follow news and information about Weblate on Twitter, Facebook or Google+.

Weblate 2.3 has been released today. It comes with better features for project owners, better file formats support and more configuration options for users.

Full list of changes for 2.3:

• Dropped support for Django 1.6 and South migrations.
• Support for adding new translations when using Java Property files
• Allow to accept suggestion without editing.
• Improved support for Google OAuth2.
• Added support for Microsoft .resx files.
• Tuned default robots.txt to disallow big crawling of translations.
• Simplified workflow for accepting suggestions.
• Added project owners who always receive important notifications.
• Allow to disable editing of monolingual template.
• More detailed repository status view.
• Direct link for editing template when changing translation.
• Allow to add more permissions to project owners.
• Allow to show secondary language in zen mode.
• Support for hiding source string in favor of secondary language.

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.

Weblate is also being used https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and other projects.

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!

PS: The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

Few days ago, I've started writing Odorik module to manipulate with API of one Czech mobile network operator. As usual, the code comes with documentation written in English. Given that vast majority of users are Czech, it sounds useful to have in Czech language as well.

The documentation itself is written in Sphinx and built using Read the Docs. Using those to translate the documentation is quite easy.

First step is to add necessary configuration to the Sphinx project as described in their Internationalization Quick Guide. It's matter of few configuration directives and invoking of sphinx-intl and the result can be like this commit.

Once the code in repository is ready, you can start building translated documentation on the Read the docs. There is nice guide for that as well. All you need to do is to create another project, set it's language and link it from master project as translation.

The last step is to find some translators to actually translate the document. For me the obvious choice was using Weblate, so the translation is now on Hosted Weblate. The mass import of several po files can be done by import_project management command.

And thanks to all these you can now read Czech documentation for python Odorik module.

Weblate 2.2 has been released today. It comes with improved search, user interface cleanup and various other fixes.

Full list of changes for 2.2:

• Performance improvements.
• Fulltext search on location and comments fields.
• New SVG/javascript based activity charts.
• Support for Django 1.8.
• Support for deleting comments.
• Added own SVG badge.
• Added support for Google Analytics.
• Improved handling of translation file names.
• Added support for monolingual JSON translations.
• Record component locking in a history.
• Support for editing source (template) language for monolingual translations.
• Added basic support for Gerrit.

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.

Weblate is also being used https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, Gammu, Weblate itself and other projects.

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!

PS: The roadmap for next release is just being prepared, you can influence this by expressing support for individual issues either by comments or by providing bounty for them.

In past days, several new free software projects have been added to Hosted Weblate. If you are interested in translating your project there, just follow instruction at our website.

The new projects include:

• Webcamoid, a webcam capture application
• Loowid, a webconference solution based on webrtc
• Money Manager EX, a personal finance software
• Noosfero hosting was extended to cover plugins as well

PS: Added later during the week:

• Boilr, a cryptocurrency and bullion price alarms for Android
• SwitchyOmega, a proxy manager and switcher for Chromium