Michal Čihař - Archive for 4/2013

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:

• Please check manual for upgrade instructions.
• Added public user pages.
• Better naming of plural forms.
• Added support for TBX export of glossary.
• Added support for Bitbucket notifications.
• Activity charts are now available for each translation, language or user.
• Extended options of import_project admin command.
• Compatible with Django 1.5.
• Avatars are now shown using libravatar.
• Added possibility to pretty print JSON export.
• Various performance improvements.
• Indicate failing checks or fuzzy strings in progress bars for projects or languages as well.
• Added support for custom pre-commit hooks and commiting additional files.
• Rewritten search for better performance and user experience.
• New interface for machine translations.
• Added support for monolingual po files.
• Extend amount of cached metadata to improve speed of various searches.
• Now shows word counts as well.

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.

phpMyAdmin 4.0-rc2 is out and if your want to have your language in final release, it's last moment to start working on translation.

So let's look at which translations are at 100% right now (new ones are bold):

• Catalan
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English (United Kingdom)
• Estonian
• French
• German
• Greek
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Slovenian
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

Almost complete:

• Galician
• Polish
• Russian
• Simplified Chinese

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 4.0 using translation server.

If your language is already fully translated and you want to help as well, you can translate our documentation as well.

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.

phpMyAdmin has been accepted for Google Summer of Code 2013. So if you are a student and thinking about how to spend this summer, you might want to join us.

This year we will have fresh mentor blood and we have prepared dozen of ideas, so in case you are interested, it's really the time to start to work on your application. We require you to contribute before GSoC, so that we can see you can handle the code and our tools. All details you might need are available in our applicant guide.

Our requirements might sound strict, but without them, we would drown in hundredths of applications with no clue how to decide, so do your homework and prepare perfect application. If you have any questions, get in touch with us on mailing list and get ready for April 22th, when you can submit the application.

phpMyAdmin has in last year received various useful features, which are not that well known. I've decided to give them some promotion before releasing phpMyAdmin 4.0.

The server monitoring part is already present since phpMyAdmin 3.5, but some of the parts were further improved in 4.0.

Server monitor (as you can see on picture above or on demo server) allows you to follow server status in real time. Besides predefined charts, you can choose to follow any of MySQL server status variables or some system parameters.

If you see something weird in the charts, you can select interval and inspect slow or general query log (if you have enabled it). This can help you finding most problematic queries for your server.

Advisor (on picture above or on demo server) is another way to improve server performance - it comes with extensive set of rules, which can help you tuning performance for your workload. Your server has to be running for significant time to give some reasonable recommendations (so don't expect these on the demo server, which is restarted quite often). However it is still recommended to read server documentation before doing any adjustments, as the setting might have some side effects, which will affect your workload as well.

Of course these are not magic pill to cure your unresponsive server, but can help you a lot in finding possible bottlenecks.

phpMyAdmin 4.0-rc1 is out and it's really time to work on translations if you want them to be ready for final release..

So let's look at which translations are at 100% right now (new ones are bold):

• Catalan
• Czech
• Danish
• Dutch
• English (United Kingdom)
• Estonian
• French
• Greek
• Portuguese (Brazil)
• Spanish
• Swedish
• Turkish

Almost complete:

• Galician
• German
• Polish
• Russian
• Simplified Chinese
• Slovenian

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 4.0 using translation server.

If your language is already fully translated and you want to help as well, you can translate our documentation as well.

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.