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Upgraded to 1.0, woohoo!

A fresh road leading to increased stability and awesome future plans.
Please fasten seat belts and remain calm for takeoff.

Dear fellow Transifexian,

We've just finished upgrading, testing, bugfixing and polishing a super major upgrade of Transifex.net. We're psyched with the new features and the scalability the release brings, as well as the control and options added to everyone's workflow.

We've went on and re-written the core Transifex Translation Storage Engine from scratch. If you were wondering what have we been cooking in the last 6 months, since the last newsletter was sent, well, this is it. Transifex is gradually becoming "git for translations". We now have a solid foundation on top of which we can continue making Transifex available to a bigger audience and continue innovating on the service. The new engine can handle way more fine-grained precision than before, since it is now working on the very strings inside your translation files.

Major changes

The new version brings some big changes to the traditional workflow used by project maintainers. In particular:

  1. Translations are now stored inside Transifex instead of being auto-committed to the versioning systems. Project maintainers will now have to use a command-line client to export the translation files from Transifex, e.g. right before a software release. The command-line client is continuously enriched with new functionality, and will eventually become something like 'a vcs for translations'.
  2. Instead of cloning the whole VCS repository, Transifex can now monitor a source language file using a public HTTP link to it, such as your GitHub "raw" URL link to the English PO file. The command-line client can also be used to push the source language files, such as after a string freeze.
  3. Support for more translation sources, such as QT's .ts file format were added. We're already testing Joomla .ini files and others.

Moar featurez:

  • Translation file metadata auto-updating (PO headers)
  • Clone a language (useful for en-GB, fr-CA, etc.)
  • Non-English Source Languages for resources
  • Web Editor: Translate from Multiple Source Languages, Translation suggestions, Keyboard Shortcuts
  • Basic support for Translation Memory
  • AJAX support in many places, including the web editor and common screens
  • 100 new languages, now reaching 261
  • Application Programmable Interface
  • New Transifex.net Help Section

Migrating your project

If you’re a translator, the only differences you will notice are the UI improvements we made. More AJAX, nicer controls on your files, incremental saves in the web editor.

If you’re a developer, please refer to the section Migrating Your Project to make sure your code and workflow are migrated. Basically you’ll need to start using a command-line tool, similarly to how you interact with your own versioning system. Then, you can run a couple of commands on your local workstation to pull fresh files from Transifex whenever is needed -- e.g. before you release your software. To make this process automated, Makefile rules are our friends. We understand that this might require some extra work, but we really think it's worth it in the long term!

This was a very big step for our small team and large codebase, so please bear with us while we're learning and getting more experienced with smooth upgrades. If you have any questions, take a look at the FAQ, or contact us directly at support@indifex.com. If you need assistance over the telephone or Skype, just let us know straight away. For live, community-based IRC support, you may find us on #transifex on Freenode.

Let a thousand languages bloom!

About Transifex

Transifex is a one-stop, batteries-included Localization Hub, helping developers reach out to an international user-base. Transifex supports translations over standard formats, straight from the development repository. More than 2.000 projects and companies are using Transifex to an international audience of many millions.

Transifex is being developed by Indifex, a fresh company based in sunny Greece. We work closely with large corporations as well as a large number of small-to-medium enterprises. Learn more about our work and our services at www.indifex.com. Do you think we can help your company with its Localization needs? Get in touch with us.