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.

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).

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.