What's Narro good for?

Being too busy developing the application, I've never described in the simplest way possible what's Narro good for. Since examples are the best way to learn, here's one:

Old process:

1. svn checkout file.po (CVS, hg, git or any other similar command)
2. poedit file.po (Open the file with a program to translate it)
3. svn commit file.po (commit the translations I've made with let's say poEdit)

Actual process using Narro:

1. svn checkout file.po (CVS, hg, git or any other similar command)
2. import the file in Narro
3. translate the file in Narro
4. export the file from Narro
5. svn commit file.po (commit the translations I've made with let's say poEdit)

Although it seems that the actual process got complicated, there are several major improvements:

• one text can have more translations than one
  
• people can translate at the same time
  
• the only tool they need is a browser
• I can introduce various methods to improve quality, like the ones already implemented: punctuation check, spell check and entity check

As you can see from the example, the checkout and commit operations are still done the old way, right now using some cron jobs. That's because Narro doesn't know right now to import from something else than a directory. In the next version I plan to add the possibility to write various plugins for sources of translations.

Narro has its own translation in gettext

This entire post is about Narro's interface, not the files it handles for translation.

I've changed the internationalization engine that Narro uses for its translation from home made to gettext, so now there's a pot file to translate.

For those using l10n.mozilla.org, you'll have to approve the texts again, but this time you can export a po file an send it to me so I can include it in newer versions.
When you export the translation, a compiled file is generated as well besides the export po file and the translation in Narro is activated instantly.

Sadly, the engine I use, Zend_Translate, doesn't care about plurals, but since it's an active project I hope future versions will support plurals. And right now there are a few places that would use plurals, about 10, so it's not a big issue.

Narro 0.9.3 is out

Here goes another release. It wasn't the best time to release as there are many things to add, but the 0.9.2 version was getting too old and the trunk version is used without problems on two working installation, so things were stable enough.

I'll highlight the most important additions in this release:

• permissions are grouped in roles now, which makes user management easier
• "validate" changed into "approve"
• you can export the unapproved suggestions based on several criteria, like the most voted ones, or your suggestions

Download from the project page: http://code.google.com/p/narro/

For the next version, I'd like to create customizable import and export sources that will allow you to get the translation from CVS and post it back to CVS for example. With this step, a general cleaning and improvement on messages on the import/export side will come so people that experienced problems with different php installations should be a little happier with the next version. I myself and a few others will be happy as well to publish their changes directly to versioning systems.

As always, feel free to suggest ideas or report bugs about Narro.

Narro @ Fosdem

I'm going to Fosdem, so if you're there and interested in having a talk with me, try to find my head in the croud.

For those of you who can't make it, I'd just like to recommend to use the trunk version of Narro until a release is done. There were many changes, but there's no time right now for a release.

I'm planning to work on defining sources for import and export so that you can import and export directly from/to versioning systems. This is one of the most important things after getting Narro working as a translation tool.

Narro @ MozCamp

If you're attending this year's Mozilla Camp Europe on October 25/26 you can meet me there to talk, praise, criticise or make suggestions to improve Narro.

Lately I've been hearing about people discovering Narro by themselves and installing it successfully, but more than that, actually using it. This is great considering that I haven't made any changes recently. I've been using Narro myself for all the translations that I'm coordinating and some that others wanted to coordinate in Narro.

If I'd get some help from some php developers, that would be great, but the chance to find a php developer that is into translation seems quite low, but I'm still hoping.

See you in Barcelona!

Still here

Yes, I'm still here although it has been rather quiet. I've been busy translating and meanwhile I discovered that it's a bless to have an application that just works although I haven't worked on it for a month. Yes, I'm talking about Narro.

I've just returned to the code. I've started with several small fixes, like an issue on the login page. The big things that need to be done are still the improvement of the import process as people have been complaining that it doesn't work on new installations and there is no specific error and adding roles, since managing users is rather hard now with all these permissions. Yes, committing and retreiving from versioning systems is another big thing as well. I'd say it's the next big thing.

Upcoming: User roles, dashboard page and notifications

Thanks to a few people that gave valuable feedback and myself, I have many improvements planned for future versions. Among them are user roles, since the permissions are growing and it's getting hard to manage permissions for each user, a dashboard page that will replace the project list as a start page and improvements in notifications that should allow you to recieve just a digest message via RSS (or possibly email in the future) and see the whole bunch of modifications, no matter how large in Narro, nicely paginated.

For those of you using l10n.mozilla.org installation, note that lately the machine is slower than it used to be, other installations are just fine. I recommend that you find a place where you can keep your own Narro instance if possible.

Regarding integration with versioning systems, it will have to wait a bit, at least one version, because I need the features described above for the projects I'm translating. Remember, I actually translate, that's why I'm writing this application.