Development Seed

Recently we built a multilingual website for the International Council on Archives. Training their staff on how to use the website drove home - again - just how bulky it was to translate text in multilingual Drupal websites. So last week I worked on an update on the l10n_client to streamline the translating process and simply make translating content easier.

Here's a screencast that shows how you can now translate text with the update:

The l10n_client update includes several bugfixes/optimizations as well as some cool new features:

Bugfixes

• The string list now displays translated strings in the target rather than source language.
• Strings are now stored in a hidden DOM tree rather than a javascript array. The array was causing browser slowdowns on some pages with lots of strings.
• Several other small fixes and optimizations.

New Features

• String list "live search"
• Simple keybindings: F1 toggles the l10n_client panel, ESC clears a live search
• Selected-text quicksearch: Hilight a string to be translated and hit F1 to automatically find it in the string list

Many thanks to Gabor Hojtsy, lead Drupal 6 developer and maintainer of the l10n_client module. Also, a big thanks to Jose Reyero who backported l10n_client to Drupal 5. We're now using l10n_client on several multilingual Drupal 5 sites and have gotten very useful feedback from our users. These improvements should find their way back to the Drupal CVS version of l10n_client sometime next week. You can also find Jose's Drupal 5 backport of l10n_client in our repository here:

http://svn3.cvsdude.com/vvc/devseed/sandbox/l10n_client_backport/(Note: requires a patch to the locale module)

Technical Note

• If you're wondering why the search is case sensitive, it is because l10n_client makes use of the JQuery selector :contains. This is an incredibly powerful and fast selector - it more than doubled the speed of l10n_client's search (which was previously case-insensitive but much more costly).