Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for phpMyAdmin

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.

You probably know about heartbleed bug in OpenSSL as it is so widespread that it got to mainstream medias as well. As I'm running Debian Wheezy on my servers, they were affected as well.

The updated OpenSSL library was installed immediately after it has been released, but there was still option that somebody got private data from the server before (especially as the vulnerability exists for quite some time). So I've revoked and reissued all SSL certificates while regenerating new private keys. This has nice benefit that they now use SHA 256 intermediate CA compared to SHA 1 which was used on some of them before.

Though there is no way to figure out whether there was some information leak or not, I have decided to reset all access tokens for OAuth (eg. GitHub), so if you have used GitHub login for Weblate, you will have to reauthenticate.

Today, I've replaced server SSL certificates with new ones issues by GlobalSign. These should not suffer of same trust problems as CACert one used so far (especially after CACert root certificate being removed from Debian).

While doing this, I had to use SNI on server to be able to decide which SSL certificate it should use. This should work for any decent browser, but I guess your scripts might have problems, but I hope this will be rare. Anyway if you will face some issues because of this, please let me know.

Other than that I've also tweaked SSL setup to follow current best practice, what could also cause troubles to some ancient clients, but I hope these are non existing in this case :-). See Qualys SSL report for more details.

Anyway thanks to GlobalSign free SSL certificates for open source projects you can use hosted Weblate without any SSL warnings.

PS: Similar change (just without SNI) has happened last week on phpMyAdmin web servers as well.