2015 – What to expect for mqTranslate

  • Plugin Author chsxf

    (@chsxf)


    9 years, 11 months ago

    As a starter, I would like to wish you all a very happy new year 2015!

    And thank you for using mqTranslate. The plugin has been downloaded more than 85,000 times and this count should reach 100,000 by the end of the month.

    It is a difficult task to satisfy every user and it represents a significant amount of work just to maintain the plugin up to date with WordPress upgrades. But I’m here and will continue to support mqTranslate as long as I can. I am a user of this plugin myself, so it would be counter-productive to drop support.

    However, you may have heard of other forks of the original qTranslate, among them qTranslate Plus, zTranslate and qTranslate-X. qTranslate Plus seems to be a dead project and zTranslate’s developer recently merged with the author of qTranslate-X. Those two very talented developers and I are currently discussing a possible merge of mqTranslate and qTranslate-X. Having several different forks developed concurrently is not safe for end users, so it is obvious both projects will merge at a time. We are only discussing how to do it and the best strategy to achieve the merge.

    zTranslate, then qTranslate-X, implemented a different but very smart user interface for switching between languages. Furthermore, this feature is much less difficult to maintain as it is not dependant with some specific versions of WordPress or TinyMCE, and it can be easily integrated in most parts of the administration panel, allowing translation of some assets that was still unsupported. So, I will use most of my mqTranslate dedicated time to backport improvements from qTranslate-X to mqTranslate (while keeping all specific mqTranslate features). Once, both version will be “synced”, we will be able to make a proper merge. I hope this will be good for the release of WordPress 4.2 (planned in April 2015) or, at least, for 4.3 (planned in August 2015).

    On another hand, I know that many support requests are left open without response, and I truly apologize for that. But as expressed earlier, I do not have time to handle it alone. That’s why this merge is a very good opportunity. From one developer today, we will be three in the future. And maybe more.

    Then, this implies some changes for mqTranslate.

    Current version, 2.9.1.2, will be the last of the 2.x cycle. In order to bring some consistency, further versions will be named as follow : year.month.patch_level. So, the next version will probably be 2015.4.0 (if aligned with WordPress 4.2).

    Based on a suggestion of qTranslate-X’s author, mqTranslate is not a perfect name as the plugin is not tied to the original qTranslate in the WordPress plugins search engine results. As a consequence, mqTranslate may change its name in the future (while not changing its slug and filename prefix – which will remain mqtranslate – so a name starting with M would be a good pick). If you have any suggestion, I am open to it.

    Testers will be needed. In order to avoid a buggy release for this new cycle, I will need some of you to check everything works fine before publishing for everyone. I will let you know when this help will be needed.

    I have no doubt 2015 will be a great year for mqTranslate and the whole qTranslate community. Thank you very much for your support.

    Stay tuned.

    https://www.ads-software.com/plugins/mqtranslate/

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)

  • Great news for qTranslate platform in the future!
    Keep up the good work, have a great merge, with all the credit you deserve for maintaing mqTranslate alive, for a while it has been the only usable plugin. Hope it all merge well ??
    Best regards
    Pedro

    Great plan, I really hate the qtranslate editor interface – hence I’m using a very old fckeditor – which is incompatible with mqtranslate and it keeps a single window – and I just use shortcodes…

    (alternatively I just take out all the editor sourcecode from mqtranslate).

    I’ld really propose again – for simplicity – to have an editorfree mode/version. Just mqtranslate basic functionaliy – no editormess – no codestripping stuff – and then just use [:en] [:de] and so on shortcodes. I must say the qtranslate x approach seems also very usable however.

    (oh and WPML is really no better solution. I would not use any qtranslate fork If I started a new website – but use one of the multisite approaches – because that’s the cleanest thing – qtranslate backend is still awfully slow to render (adds about 100% to my pageload time – thanks god powerful server) – and not very code clean – but it is IMHO still much better than WPML approach.

    My main gripe with any plugin is that for sites where there is a lot of similar content for each langauge – there is no all languages shortcode. E.g. [:en]English text/content [:de]German text/content [:int]content for all languages [:en] continue English content, and so on… clearly that approach is not usable with any editor that doesn’t show all the languages in one window so I have no hope this will ever be implemented – nor compatible with multisite approaches.)

    @extremecarver: BTW, what you ask is already implemented in qTranslate-X, turn on ‘Editor Raw Mode’ ??

    If you decide to test, please use the latest alpha version from GitHub, which can be downloaded from there (look for button Download), or click here for the sake of convenience.

    And also, multi-site approach is also now supported by -X (URL mode ‘Per-Domain’), that one is not tested yet at all. Do you wish to test it?

    mqTranslate should hopefully merge to that version later anyway. BTW, do you use membership feature of mq? If so, then -X does not have it yet. It may be extracted later from mq- as a separate plugin when we merge.

    Thanks John – I’m gonna test it out soon. (got an more or less identical backup website to play on anyhow)

    I gonna have to read up on the multi-site approach – but I guess I’m not a candidate for it (I do have to sites using identical theme/plugins – but they each have their own database and I cannot really merge them.) Multisite didn’t exist when I created the websites.

    and I don’t know about membership features provided by mq? I’m using s2member as I’m locked in and cannot switch to a decent membership plugin like WooCommerce or EDD..

    Plugin Author chsxf

    (@chsxf)

    @extremecarver: There is no “membership” feature in mqTranslate. In fact, what John is talking about is an admin panel feature that allows admins to set only a specific subset of languages available to some editors or contributors. It prevents some users to modify parts of the text in languages they do not master.

    Ah okay – regarding Raw Mode – I will reply in the qtranslate-X support forum. It’s working 90%

Viewing 6 replies - 1 through 6 (of 6 total)
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