The Translate extension for MediaWiki is no longer just a hack for translatewiki.net. Actually it hasn’t been that for a long time anymore, but recently other projects have started using it. That means lots of things, like supporting stable releases of MediaWiki, instead of just development versions.
Today’s topic is documentation. I have been amending our existing documentation with Siebrand. Previously there was only some documentation how to install the Translate extension. Now we have sections for the page translation feature, the configuration of the extension, message group configuration and command line scripts. All these have been collected into our documentation index page along with links to other resources. One of those other resources is code documentation generated with Doyxgen. That should really help anyone who is interested in developing for the Translate extension – yes, we are looking for help!
Naturally documentation is a moving target and it will be improved continuously, like the code itself. While we have documentation for developers and those who want to install and configure the Translate extension, we are still lacking great user documentation in many areas. Even though the saying goes that good software does not need separate documentation, that does not mean we shouldn’t have any. It is important to show everyone what can be done with the Translate extension and to get them either interested or have them use the software (more) efficiently as an end user.