Last weekend the Indifex developers released the new version of Transifex, “an open service allowing people to collaboratively translate software, documentation and other types of projects.” Codenamed “Pyro" (all releases are named after a X-Men villains), Transifex 0.7 has a pretty lengthy list of new features and bug fixes to make any translator worth his/her salt cry with joy!
The one feature sure to turn people’s head is the ability to do their translations online using their Lotte Translation Editor. “Its main features are still under heavy development, but following the ‘Release early, Release often’ principle, we’ve unleashed this lady out in the wild to get some feedback and improve”, says Dimitris Glezos, all time mountain climber and Indifex's head honcho.
Fine-grained permissions, submissions to a mailbox, user profiles, and publican-like I18n support are only a few more nuggets that you will find on Pyro, making it one of the hottest releases of 2009 so make sure to put on your oven mittens!
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 Amazon 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 address using port 8003. Login with the credentials ‘admin’ and ‘password’ and make sure to change the password once you’ve successfully logged in.
This appliance comes pre-bundled with a couple of projects already created for you to play with. Log in to the Transifex interface using either guest/guest or editor/editor as your user name and password combination and tinker to your heart’s content!
A couple of new features that have been added to the appliance itself was the ability to read/download Transifex, Apache and My SQL log files and a new customized front page (just see above).
I’ve also customized the list of services one would most likely want to manage (start, stop, restart) to simplify this administrative task. For the next customization, as the appliance already allows you to take backups over NFS, CIFS/Samba and/or local storage, I will configure it so that it includes all the files related to Transifex itself, including database dumps and configuration files.
Have you got a pretty cool project hosted on Github, Gitorious, Bitbucket or any one of these cool self serve code hosting services and want to attract more translators to help you make your project “speak different languages”? Don’t want to move your source code to another host? Don’t want to run your own version of Transifex? Not a problem! Just head down to Transifex.net and register your project for translations completely FREE of charge! You see, Transifex.net is also a hub for translators to offer their services and showcase their skills, so once you’re in, it will be dead easy to attract collaborators!
Need to step it up a notch and get quality support service, direct access to new releases and even on-site support? Get in touch with the amazing Indifex folks and check out their professional services. Some amazing projects are already trusting their translations to Transifex, so what are you waiting for?