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My involvement in GlotPress

GlotPress is a collaborative, web-based software translation tool. It allows you to your translate plugins and themes and gives your users also a way to contribute back. The website http://translate.wordpress.org is also powered by GlotPress and lets you translate things as WordPress core and the mobile apps.

The history

This year I started with a plan to build a WordPress plugin out of the current GlotPress codebase to make it more workable for me. I already have a lot of the basic stuff done but it’s still lacking functionality. The main reason for that is that the current code base wasn’t stable enough and to me that needed to be fixed first. So I taken over the project and try to be the project lead of it. It’s quite tricky when 736 commits happened before you started. In the beginning it was hard to make decisions and some stuff got reverted because it conflicted with logic on WordPress.org

But still this year goes pretty well. There already been 70 commits. We fixed some irritating bugs like incorrect counts on the project page but also added some cool features as the ability to make a child theme, improved the API, improved the formats for Android and Windows Phone. We also did quite a few comments to reduce the amount of strict warnings. This still need some more work on the side of BackPress.

The progress this year isn’t that bad. Specially when you look at the commits of the last two years. 2012 is a bit lower when you don’t count the commits that adds locales and remove trailing whitespace. That said also this year we did add a few locales.

Commit history

2008: 32
2009: 341
2010: 223
2011: 58
2012: 79
2013: 70 and counting

What’s next

The goal for the next couple of months is to get milestone 1.0 completed. On the blog of GlotPress I talked about the future plans. So not all tickets will get fixed and those tickets will be moved to milestone 1.1. I just would love to see a 1.0 release as a zip file. Now people use SVN and that doesn’t mean it’s always stable. You do try your best to not create issues but sometimes things just happens. The goal is to make GlotPress a better tool for WordPress but also for non WordPress projects.

WordPress 3.7

For the next release of WordPress language packs will get added. This is something that also need some GlotPress adjustments. If it isn’t API changes then making importing and translating better. One of the things is to improve translating. Like when you translate a string that is the similar in sub projects then also translate it there. So when translating a grammar mistake in the development version that it also checks if it exists in 3.6, 3,5 etc. We will see how this goes and what users think of it.

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