Michal Čihař - Archive for 4/2018

What's being cooked for Weblate 3.0

Next release on Weblate roadmap is called 3.0 and will bring some important changes. Some of these are already present in the Git repository and deployed on Hosted Weblate, but more of that will follow.

Component discovery

Component discovery is useful feature if you have several translation components in one repository. Previously import_project management command was the only way to help you, however it had to be executed manually on any change. Now you can use Component discovery addon which does quite similar thing, however is triggered on VCS update, so it can be used to follow structure of your project without any manual interaction. This feature is already available in Git and on Hosted Weblate, though you have to ask for initial setup there.

Code cleanups

Over the years (first Weblate release was more than six years ago) the code structure is far from optimal. There are several code cleanups scheduled and some of them are already present in Git repository. This will make Weblate easier to maintain and extend (eg. with third party file format drivers).

User management

Since the beginning Weblate has relied on user management and permissions as provided by Django. This is really not a good fit for language / project matrix permissions which most people need so we've come with Group ACL to extend this. This worked quite well for some use cases, but it turned out to be problematic for others. It is also quite hard to setup properly. For Weblate 3.0 this will be dropped and replaced by access control which fits more use cases. This is still being finalized in our issue tracker, so if you have any comments to this, please share them.

Migration path

Due to above mentioned massive changes, migrations across 3.0 will not be supported. You will always have to upgrade to 3.0 first and then upgrade to further versions. The code cleanups will also lead to some changes in the configuration, so take care when upgrading and follow upgrading instructions.

New projects on Hosted Weblate

Hosted Weblate provides also free hosting for free software projects. The hosting requests queue has grown too long and waited for more than month, so it's time to process it and include new projects. I hope that gives you have good motivation to spend Christmas break by translating free software.

This time, the newly hosted projects include:

If you want to support this effort, please donate to Weblate, especially recurring donations are welcome to make this service alive. You can do that easily on Liberapay or Bountysource.

Weblate 2.20

Weblate 2.20 has been released today. There are several performance improvements, new features and bug fixes.

Full list of changes:

  • Improved speed of cloning subversion repositories.
  • Changed repository locking to use third party library.
  • Added support for downloading only strings needing action.
  • Added support for searching in several languages at once.
  • New addon to configure Gettext output wrapping.
  • New addon to configure JSON formatting.
  • Added support for authentication in API using RFC 6750 compatible Bearer authentication.
  • Added support for automatic translation using machine translation services.
  • Added support for HTML markup in whiteboard messages.
  • Added support for mass changing state of strings.
  • Translate-toolkit at least 2.3.0 is now required, older versions are no longer supported.
  • Added built in translation memory.
  • Added componentlists overview to dashboard and per component list overview pages.
  • Added support for DeepL machine translation service.
  • Machine translation results are now cached inside Weblate.
  • Added support for reordering commited changes.

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

You can find more information about Weblate on https://weblate.org, the code is hosted on Github. If you are curious how it looks, you can try it out on demo server. Weblate is also being used on https://hosted.weblate.org/ as official translating service for phpMyAdmin, OsmAnd, Turris, FreedomBox, Weblate itself and many other projects.

Should you be looking for hosting of translations for your project, I'm happy to host them for you or help with setting it up on your infrastructure.

Further development of Weblate would not be possible without people providing donations, thanks to everybody who have helped so far! 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.