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A bit more than a week ago, I announced that Web Translate It was using a new system to generate stats. If the new stats engine makes pages using statistics load faster —which is already a great feature— it was in fact the first part of a bigger feature: project reporting.

On your project page, you now have a new tab: Statistics.

If you have been using Web Translate It these past days you should already have enough data for populating this page.

Let’s have a quick tour and see what this new feature does.

Detailed stats

The new stats engine not only counts the amount of strings by status, it also counts the amount of words. The statistics page displays all this data.

Deltas

Web Translate It also calculates deltas. This is the variation of the amount of strings between one day and another.

If nothing happened on your project during some period of time (for example during the week-end), then there is nothing to display. In the example below, nothing happened between the 7th and the 11th of January.

Graphs

The graphs represent the amount of strings, by status, over time. Hover the graph and you will get a bit more information.

I hope you will find project reporting useful. Let me know if you have any suggestion or comments. Thank you for using Web Translate It.

I just updated the API with a few improvements and a new endpoint.

Improvements

The locale endpoint, which allows you to fetch a list of locales accepted by your project is now capable of returning xml, json or yaml by simply appending the format you want at the end of the URL.

For example, if you want your list of locales in YAML, you would call /api/projects/04b254da22a6eb301b103f848e469ad494eea47d/locales.yaml and it would return something like so:

--- 
locales: 
- name: French, France
  code: fr_FR

New Endpoint: Project information

This new endpoint can be very useful to develop an advanced integration between Web Translate It and your application.

It returns 5 things:

• the project name,
• a list of locales accepted by the project,
• the project source locale,
• the language file ids and names.

The data is available in xml, json or yaml.

An example of the data structure in YAML would be:

--- 
project: 
  name: Web Translate It
  source_locale: 
    name: English, United Kingdom
    code: en_GB
  target_locales: 
  - name: French, France
    code: fr_FR
    type: Locale
  project_files: 
  - name: fr.yml
    id: 1175
  - name: en.yml
    id: 1174

I hope these improvements will make easier for everyone to integrate Web Translate It with their application and develop awesome extensions.

For detailed API specifications, check API Information on Web Translate It.

The API and on the Web Translate It plugin for Ruby on Rails. All of what follows use Web Translate It’s API which is only available on paying accounts.

API upgrade

The new API use a different URL and allow users to fetch their strings file by file. This is especially important for projects with several files to fetch their strings via the API.

The older API is deprecated, but will keep functioning indefinitely, so there is absolutely no need to update anything on your side if the endpoint you currently use works well for your project.

The other new feature is the ability to update a language file through the API. This can be really useful if you want to automatise the workflow between your project and Web Translate It.

What you do of it is entirely up to you. It could be used by a nightly or weekly task to upload an updated version of your master language file. This way new strings would be automatically added on Web Translate It.

For more information, I invite you to refer to the new API documentation for developers on Web Translate It.

Rails plugin upgrade

The plugin for integrating Web Translate It with Ruby on Rails projects has had a nice update today and now use the new API.

Once installed and set up, it allows you —if you want to— to sync the translations between your app with Web Translate It for every page requested. This is great for translators to test their work on a staging website.

It also comes with 3 rake tasks to help you manage your translations:

• rake trans:fetch:all to fetch all your translations in all languages,
• rake trans:fetch[fr_FR] to only fetch the french translations,
• rake trans:upload[en] to send a new version of your language file to Web Translate It.

Grab it on Github if you haven’t already!

Thanks for using Web Translate It!

Happy new year! Here are a bunch of improvements for 2010.

Statistics

This is not really a new feature, but rather a different way of calculating statistics. Instead of processing them on every page load and asking you to wait a few seconds until it loads, stats calculation is deferred and calculated in the background. This is the same system used for the language file importer/exporter and the search engine’s indexer.

Since you don’t have to wait for the stats calculations to finish, the pages load much faster. You will sometimes see a notice indicating the stats are not up to date.

Web Translate It will then bring the stats up to date and automatically display them when available. It usually takes less than two seconds.

The filters and the stats section on the top of the translation interface have been redesigned to be clearer and easier to use.

This improvement is the first part of an upcoming new feature: project reporting. With reporting, you will be able to get detailed stats about your project over time. This requires the ability to generate costly statistics without making the website slower.

On top of the statistics improvements, many other tweaks have been done to make the translation interface load faster.

Progress bars on language page

The language page now has a progress bar indicating the percentage of completed and translated strings for that project. Of course, it also use deferred calculations.

Better Markdown help

Comments on Web Translate It are formatted using Markdown, an easy to use markup language. The help section about Markdown was very poor. You now have a decent help page for helping you to write better comments.

I open-sourced it if you need this help page on your own project.

That’s it! I hope you will enjoy these improvements, thank you for using Web Translate It!