Does your role within a project have you asking the following questions?

• How do I provide an interface for translators to submit translations to multiple projects, regardless of the type of the underlying VCS?
• How do I reduce the overhead a project maintainer usually undertakes to administrate accounts for translators?
• How do I help translators do more by eliminating the need to subscribe to each VCS and learn its commands and tricks?
• How do I encourage collaboration between developers and maintainers and thus, increase the language coverage of the participant projects?

Then boy, have I got some good news for you. I’d like to announce the birth of the Transifex Appliance! That’s right, your own translation platformat your fingertips! Designed from the ground up to serve as a bridge between source code repositories and translators starving to flex their multilingual skills, it completely obliterates all the initial administrative and infra structural needs and allows you to just get it done!

Long gone are the days where you had to migrate your well established source code to a different management provider in order to take advantage of much needed features. It doesn’t matter where your code lives, Transifex will allow your translators to reserve files for translation and then submit them back via an intuitive web interface. Better yet, configure your project to automatically commit these translations from trusted translators and never have to worry about synching work again! Get notified at every step during the translation cycle and get up to the second access to statistical information and find out who is doing what and when!

Sure you could just download the source code and manually install every single dependency, including setting up and configuring a web server and a database, but why bother? Hit the ground running with a software appliance!

The Transifex Appliance was built using the amazing rBuilder Online tool, using a real Lifecycle Management Platform, which will allow me to maintain a development branch of the appliance and make sure I can test every change happening in the development of future releases of the Transifex project (think continuos testing and QA) while at the same time providing stable updates by promoting well tested code to a release/stable label.

Do you feel like playing with the Transifex Appliance right now? Got some spare machine sitting around? Maybe some type of virtualizaton tool? Perhaps you have neither and still want to try it? I have provided with the first release ISOs, VMware (R) and Amazon Machine Image (EC2) for your delight. Just head down to the project’s page and take your pick.

This release is based on the 0.6 stable release of Transifex. 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! Once the appliance is up and running, you can either connect to the Transifex instance by pointing your web browser to the appliance’s IP (i.e. http://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx) or manage it by pointing your browser to that same IP but using the secure 8003 port (i.e. https://xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:8003) and log in using admin/password as your credentials.

Also make sure to send all of your comments, suggestions, feature requests, bug reports and kudos to the awesome Transifex crew, who have more than once or twice (ok, a few times) taken the time to provide me useful information and test drive this appliance!