Time stamps on actions

Adding time stamps in Narro kept me busy lately. Some users wanted to see the latest added suggestions. I wanted to move forward to provide RSS feeds with this kind of data. Like a feed with new untranslated texts. Or even a feed with new suggestions added.

So from now on, every type of user data that is added to the database is time stamped. There's a created field and a modified field. There may be a need of history in the future, but that's another table's job.

So what's next?

I'll have to add options to filter texts/contexts/suggestions by date.
The possibility to add comments to suggestions, contexts and texts.
Glossary maintenance and linking terms to texts.

Why isn't there a version you can install and use yet?

I wouldn't be able to handle all the feedback that this would generate. I'd rather lay low and let the small group of Romanian translators handle the testing and in time I'll have a stable product. Because you don't want another Pootle, do you ? You have that. But you want a complex application that allows you to manage your translation community better and faster. You're reading something I'm writing after 3 years of translating open source software. Be sure I know what's there.

The pain of gettext

Who would have thought ? I've done .dtd, .ini, .inc, .sdf and the popular gettext should have brought no problems.

So Narro likes to guess access keys. Because it's annoying to type _, &, ~ or something else in the middle of the word. So Narro deals with this by removing the annoyance and leaving the job of access key selection to the reviewer, the person who validates one of the suggestions for a text to translate.

There's even more, Narro looks for the access key in the original text and if it's found also in the translated texts, it automatically sets it. If it's not, it sets the first letter automatically.

In gettext access keys are usually preceded by & or _ . But I keep running into situations where there is a _ or & and it's not an access key like "HELP_TEXT here" or "Starting $SERVER_NAME". If you're reading this and you eat gettext for breakfast please help me find a secure way to determine access keys.