Welcome to Transifex 0.8, codenamed Magneto.
Transifex 0.8 ‘Magneto’ is a production release, featuring a multitude of collaboration features. It is targeted for new installations of Transifex and parties who choose to migrate to a new major version and enjoy the new features.
Here’s a 40K-foot view of the release major features and numbers:
513 changesets recorded
89 tickets resolved
438 files changed, 114680 insertions(+), 46081 deletions(-)
Magneto (art by Doug Hamilton-Evans)
Transifex 0.8 is a release of the open-source, community-powered Transifex flavor. It is suitable for very large proejcts with their own existing translation community, such as the Fedora Project, the GNOME Desktop etc.
Transifex is also offered as another flavor: Software-as-a-Service, at www.transifex.net, ready to serve your translations with a few clicks. Transifex.net is a one-stop, batteries-included hosted service serving independent projects and businesses which don’t want to worry about deploying their own Tx instance.
Tranisfex.net is managed by Indifex, the company sponsoring the development of Transifex itself.
For a hassle-free translation management platform, visit Transifex.net.
On to our new features now!
We’ve all been waiting for this one, so we’re proud to announce support for Translation Teams.
Starting with Transifex 0.7, translators could subscribe to projects and request permission to edit and submit updates, etc. This happened on a per-project level. Transifex 0.8 brings more collaboration and security, allowing for a more fine-grained level access control.
With Transifex 0.8, translators can now create, join and lead a language team for a particular project. Project maintainers can then delegate management of a team to a language coordinator, who can be responsible for file submissions and other language-specific bits.
Transifex retains the global access controls which had in version 0.7. Maintainers can choose one of the following access methods for their project:
Here’s a breakdown of the new feature set:
Another big and exciting feature is translation reviews. Users can now upload a file and put it under ‘review’. The file is kept on the Transifex server until it is reviewed and either accepted for submission by an authorized member (committer, team member) or rejected.
Reviews can be opened by anyone, just like tickets on bug reporting services. This way, a team can accept files from more contributors (external ones), or ask a new member to submit some work before gaining the ‘committer’ right and become a official member of the team.
Here are some more specific features:
Transifex now includes support for threaded comments across its base. Currently this is enabled in Reviews, but support for comments will expand in many more areas in the next version, enabling support for small discussion boards in relevant pages (such as the team page for example).
Full support for action history is now included in Transifex. All actions are stored and shown to the interested parties where appropriate. Support for pagination, filtering and sorting of the results is shipped out-of-the-box.
Transifex 0.8 introduces two radical changes in some of the core page and model structure:
With Transifex 0.8, the ‘big-picture’ projects which used to be mounted under ‘collections’ will be a top-level Project, enjoying the multitude of features existing there, such as teams etc. This allows Transifex, for example, to ship a new version and include translation statistics of its dependencies, such as the django-profile upstream app. In short, Projects get benefited from the collections features, and big-picture projects (which used to be named collections) benefit from the rich features programmed into Projects.
The rationale behind this big change is that Transifex used to support two notions of “projects”: The Project as a “Software project” and the Collections as a “Collection of software projects”. While the latter sounds perfectly separated from the first, here are some of the benefits from treating all projects as Projects:
The migration of these data from 0.7 → 0.8 is manual, and should only take a few minutes for a Transifex administrator.
Up until now Transifex included commit support only for repositories over SSH. This patch adds support for https repos, by allowing the administrator to define the username and password for each 2nd-level domain he’d like to serve. For example, we group together authentication for *.example.com.
If you have repositories which cannot be served over svn+ssh and are restricted to https, you can now define the credentials for each domain (two-level hostname). For example to serve svn.repos.example.com define in your respective settings file:
SVN_CREDENTIALS = {
'example.com': ('myusername', 'mypassword')
}
Warning
This feature should be used for trusted sources only in its current form, and not with domains where users can add their repositories and monitor the server requests in subdomains. This is because subdomains will still receive the password, and if a user can create his own subdomain and monitor the requests, it’s possible to see the password in plaintext.
In short: if you need to use https, make sure it’s on a server with either a single domain, or subdomains where users can’t access on a request level.
More details:
Maintainers can now receive weekly notifications with statistics and activity report for their projects. The frequency of the report delivery can be configured by tweaking the respective cron job.
Here’s a snippet of how this report looks like:
Hello John, this is Transifex at http://www.transifex.net/.
I am bringing you the weekly translation report for your project 'transifex'.
- Repository: http://code.transifex.org/mainline
- Branch: tip
- Last updated: 13:48 2009-01-25
============================== ==========
Language Completion
============================== ==========
Assamese (as) 100%
Asturian (ast) 100%
Bengali (India) (bn_IN) 100%
Catalan (Valencian) (ca) 100%
... ...
============================== ==========
Activity report from past week (last 30 actions):
- A file for Portuguese (Brazilian) (100%) has been submitted to
'tip' of the transifex project by diegobz on Fri Dec 18, 11:01.
- ...
The notifications are sent by running the txreport management command by using a cronjob once a week (or more often, as needed).
Added support for users ‘nudges’, an action intended to poke a user to wake up, or respond to a recent action.
This functionality requires the notification system to be enabled in the settings, otherwise it is disabled automatically.
Hello john, this is Transifex at http://www.transifex.net/.
The user 'guest' has nugded you.
Please, visit Transifex at http://www.transifex.net/accounts/profile/guest/
in order to see the guest's profile page.
Permission access actions related to a project now trigger a notification to the interested parties by email and the addition of actionlog entries. For example, when a user requests access to submit to a project, the maintainers are notified and the user will receive a notification if he was granted access.
Improved public profile page.
Improved VCS commit message: Now it includes the percentage completion and the new status of the po file as well:
l10n: Updated Czech (cs) translation to 100%
New status: 573 messages complete with 0 fuzzies and 0 untranslated.
Transmitted-via: Transifex (www.transifex.net)
Language names on statistics tables now link to the respective teams, retaining the link on the language locale instead.
You can experience Transifex 0.8 live at the upstream instance hosted by Indifex, at http://www.transifex.net/.
Project and community managers who want to deploy Transifex for their own community can get Transifex in a variety of ways. A tarball is available from the following locations:
RPM packages for the latest versions of Fedora are or will soon be available via yum. The same applies for RHEL 5, CentOS 5, and Scientific Linux 5, from the Fedora EPEL yum repository:
yum install transifex transifex-extras
Information about installing Transifex can be found in the Installation documentation.
If you want to play with the latest Transifex code, you may want to use our development images for the Transifex Appliance. Following the stand-alone, “batteries included” model of software appliances, you get a complete Transifex system with all dependencies and services pre-configured so that you can start experimenting with it right away. Choose from ISO, VMware or EC2 images, for both x86 and x86_64 architectures to run on a virtual machine, dedicated server or using a virtualization software.
Your appliances can be updated using its own web based management system by pointing your browser to the appliance’s IP using port 8003. Login with the credentials ‘admin’ and ‘password’. Make sure to change the password once you’ve successfully logged in.
This appliance version is based on the 0.8 branch of Transifex, where a couple of projects have already been created for you to play with. Log in using either guest/guest or editor/editor as your user name and password combination and tinker to your heart’s content!
Make sure to read the documentation and file issues/send us your feedback.
To upgrade the code, update your package distribution as usual:
The following dependencies were added in this version:
Instructions on how to install them can be found at the Installation docs. You’ll need to complete this step before actually doing the database upgrade.
Transifex includes a script which will automatically migrate your database to the new schema from the previous version. All you need to do, from a clean 0.7 schema, is run the following:
./manage.py syncdb
./manage.py migrate
To upgrade from a 0.5 schema you first need to upgrade your schema to 0.6 and from there to the current release. Instructions for the first step can be found in the relevant section of the Transifex 0.6 release notes.
The following people have contributed to this release, with one way or another:
For a list of our awesome translators, refer to the Translations section.
We’d like to publicly thank the Moblin Project for choosing Transifex as their translation platform and their ongoing support. Also, the XFCE Project has been tremendously helpful in testing and polishing this release.
Please refer to the full Transifex 0.8 changelog for more information on what has changed between the development releases and final one.
Jul 19, 2010