Code Styling Project

After i started the plugin project Codestyling-Localization i was impressed how big this will become. In the mean time the functional capabilities have been massiv extended but also the needs the user reported will grow daily.
While the plugin got a spreed at the community, i have to handle a huge number of wishes and reports now. This leads to the fact, that i have to consolidate the development and start a re-write of a new technology version more sophisticated as the concept study version which allows me and the users more flexibility.

Publishing the version 1.70 was the last one of concept study design, that gots feature extensions and defines the end of features for the version 1 series. Because of this decision this version has got a lot of new capabilities and will now report error cases more specific. Nevertheless this version will be bug fixed as long as the new one is not public and error reports reach my desk. But fundamental new extensions or wishes will not be integrated into version 1 series from now on.

Never fear, the version series 2 trunk is still in development. Starting January 2009 the development of new one redesign will reach the full capacity again. This new version will be completely restuctured inside and will also support modularisation. The first public developer version is planned to be go wild beginning march 2009 and will contain the complete new core components known. Afterwards more new features will be integrated and published too. I expect from the new structure and internal a better maintainance and faster future extension integration.

So much for that. But i want also introduce here the new features comming with version 1.70 at last update cycle. For better understanding the extensions provided, i will shortly describe them here.

original (US) Version vs. localized (DE) Version

If you download the original version from wordpress.org and want to translate it, you will face the issue, that the main language path is not included. This was forcing crashes of the main plugin page or that the files have been created at the wrong folder but couldn’t be found afterwards. This will be detected now and displayed in a proper way. If your web space allow directory creation by scripts, the missing folder can be created easly out of the plugins main page by pressing a button.

Plugin Detection and Language Path lookup

Also plugins handling has some pitfalls. It is not always possible to detect the correct path, where the plugins want to load their language files out of because every plugin writer has it’s own philosophy hosting this files. This mostly occures, if plugin authors doesn’t pre-package a template file (*.pot) and no language files but the plugin comes with some sub directories. In this case the right path can’t be detected for sure.

Handling this the plugins shows now the folder structure of this plugin instead of the language table and the user can choose by click the right folder for the translation files. I would wish for furture WordPress versions that each plugin can be asked by using a new hook to get those informations at runtime or it have to be strict part of plugin header informations. The same thing is related to textdomain informations.

comfortable search functions for translation work

After the exact match search has been critizised al lot, this can be switched off now. This works then in ignore case mode for any entered search string.
But also this was not enough for some users. That’s why the search by regular expressions has been implemented and will be supported by a new dialog. For those of you, who are not familar with the syntax, the dialog provides a short view about the most common examples. I hope that this will also help beginners of regexp seach to understand it better.

I think, that the plugin reached a solid state and good functional range. To extened this massively and catch the current position of PoEdit the above described restructuring process will be essential.

For further wishes and suggestions please send me a mail, i will collect all carefully. If the volume may reach an extra ordinary size, i will open a voting system for what will be needed most. Fixing bugs at current public version will be done nevertheless, if i get a error report about.
I hope you understand my point of view and would be glad, if you support my work with the same quality of reports and feedback as in the past.

For those of you, that want a sneak peak into the future version i will show you here the settings page of the new 2.0 alpha internal developer version.

As you can see the new version will support any new feature possible with WordPress version 2.7 and the backend get a configurable language selection too. You can change the language instantly during runtime of admin session, at the login screen or let the registered users make their choise to define it in their profile. More specific information or a potential testable beta release will be published not faster than end of January 2009.