Tag Archives: MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle

New language stuff for developers and users

MLEB 2013.01 has been released by Amir Aharoni. Lots of development has been happening in Translate due to the work on the new translation interfaces. If you are a developer, please also checkout the latest new and changed Web APIs and give us a shout in #mediawiki-i18n @freenode if you see something obviously wrong or missing. Also included in this release are bug fixes for Universal Language Selector, while the other included extensions didn’t see many changes.

Some months ago I wrote about Language tag validation in MediaWiki. A nice person named Siebrand Mazeland decided to improve the situation. As of now we have three new methods developed by the Wikimedia Language engineering team:

  • isSupportedLanguage
  • isWellFormedLanguageTag
  • isKnownLanguageTag

Unless these methods are backported to MediaWiki 1.19 and MediaWiki 1.20, it will take a while before these are being used in extensions, but after a while we should see faster and more readable code.

MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle 2012.12

MediaWiki language extension bundle 2012.12 was released just before Christmas. It is compatible with MediaWiki versions 1.20 and 1.21alpha. Downloads and installation instructions can be found at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MLEB. Announcements of new releases will be posted to mediawiki-i18n mailing list.

Here are the highlights:

cldr

  • English name for Azerbaijani (arz) was added.
  • A bug that caused local names for be-tarask not to be used was fixed.
  • Translations for be-tarask were updated.

Translate

Lots of development is ongoing on the translation user interface redesign project conducted by the WMF Language Engineering Team. New message list and translation editor (pictured) are in alpha stage, but interested users can activate them by using URL parameter tux=1 while on Special:Translate. Also, tux=0 gets back the old interface.

$wgTranslateAC and $wgTranslateEC were removed. If you were still using these, switch over to the TranslatePostInitGroups hook or $wgTranslateCC.

Bundled Solarium library was removed. Install it manually or use the MediaWiki Solarium extensions.

The new group selector (top) and part of the revamped translation editor.

Sneak peek from the new translation UX: the new group selector (top) and part of the revamped translation editor.

Other noteworthy changes in Translate:

  • ApiQueryMessageGroups module has lots of new functionality.
  • There is new ApiQueryLanguageStats module.
  • (bug 39761) Special:TranslationStats counts for edits includes also reviews
  • GettextFFS: Handle empty but existing msgctxt properly
  • New hook: TranslateSupportedLanguages

Universal Language Selector

  • Fixed a display issue in the Modern skin.
  • (bug 42382) Indicate context in input settings/more languages

MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle launches!

The Wikimedia Language Engineering team is pleased to announce the first release of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle. The bundle is a collection of a few selected MediaWiki extensions needed by any wiki which desires to be multilingual.
This first bundle release (2012.11) is compatible with MediaWiki 1.19, 1.20 and 1.21alpha.
The Universal Language Selector is a must have, because it provides an essential functionality for any user regardless on the number of languages he/she speaks: language selection, font support for displaying scripts badly supported by operating systems and input methods for typing languages that don’t use Latin (a-z) alphabet.
Maintaining multilingual content in a wiki is a mess without the Translate extension, which is used by Wikimedia, KDE and translatewiki.net, where hundreds of pieces of documentation and interface translations are updated every day; with Localisation Update your users will always have the latest translations freshly out of the oven. The Clean Changes extension keeps your recent changes page uncluttered from translation activity and other distractions.
Don’t miss the chance to practice your rusty language skills and use the Babel extension to mark the languages you speak and to find other speakers of the same language in your wiki. And finally the cldr extension is a database of language and country translations.
We are aiming to make a new release every month, so that you can easily stay on the cutting edge with the constantly improving language support. The bundle comes with clear installation and upgrade instructions. It is tested against MediaWiki release versions, so you can avoid most of the temporary breaks that would happen if you were using the latest development versions instead.
Because this is our first release, there can be some rough edges. Please provide us a lot of feedback so that we can improve for the next release.

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