Today I've released CTransifex 1.5. It fixes all reported problem since the last release (problems with the installation of the language packs) and also introduces a new language view, that will give your users more information about the status of the translation:

The "Contribute now" button will lead users directly to the language editor in transifex.

We've just released a new version of the CTransifex extension. (you can download it here)

In this version we now support the generation of language packs for esperanto. We've also updated the default lang map with mappings for sr@latin, tl_PH. We've also removed mappings for few languages that should not be used such as ar (one should use the ar_AA language team). Because our default mappings had this ar: ar-AA, ar_AA: ar-AA we were generating the same language pack twice. You will need to manually update the options to fix this -> first open the component options and clear all the content from the maping field -> click save. Once it refreshes you'll see that the options have been populated with new content -> click save again. Please also make sure that your tx config doesn't have the same mapping. Generally the rule is -> 1 mapping per unique language.

Somewhere back in 2005 the first website that I've ever build with Joomla had to be in Bulgarian. Back then Joomla was in version 1.0 and more or less websites that needed a language other than English were really hard to do. I remember downloading a hacked version that made joomla utf8 aware, so that one could properly encode Cyrillic in the DB... It was a real pain in....

Then few years later Joomla 1.5 came out and a lot of the problems that non-english speakers had when making websites were gone. Joomla was using utf8, it was possible for each extension to distribute an .ini file with the strings that needed translations (no more php files for that).

We are very excited to announce that for the last month we've been working hard to bring the Mailchimp experience back to Joomla. Thanks to Mailchimp the new "CMC - Mailchimp® for Joomla!™ " extension is going to be absolutly free!

The current feature list of CMC includes:

After 3 days of fight with Transifex my ordeal seems to be over! First a big thank you to Ratnadeep Debnath from transifex for working with me and fixing those bugs... And a big thank you for Peter van Westen for helping with my baby steps.

This tutorial is for Joomla developers that are considering the switch to transifex to manage their extension translations. Read on and I think that you will be up and running in no time.

Disappointing. I didn't think for a second that I'll say it, but so far my experience with transifex is really disappointing. If it wasn't for opentranslators.org I would not bother with them actually.

First of all let me say that I value what they try to do! I know that it is not easy to satisfy everyone and I also understand that my disappointment is largely connected with the fact that I'm new to the platform. In the next few paragraphs I'll share my experience hoping that I can save you from losing 2 days in trying to upload your extension translation files to transifex. I also hope that this blog post will be of use to transifex and it will help them improve their system.