Hello folks!

I hope you're having some relaxing holidays. At this time of the year we're also in the process of finishing and cleaning up things. After getting a few complaints about launchpad and after having my own issues with the translation system of launchpad, I'm now trying out the capabilities of the Transifex platform. For some unknown reason Transifex didn't appear on my radar when we decided to move from our home-grown translation system some existing online translation service.

But compared to launchpad, Transifex really is shiny star with great features: first of all, it natively supports our PHP-style localization files. So no conversion to and from the gettext format is necessary. Then the commandline tools come in very handy and make it easy to sync translations with our git repository. Although I had tackled together a script to import translations from launchpad, there was always something failing which made it impossible to run it automatically in a cron job. The Transifex platform seems to be very solid and well-developed whereas launchpad has some serious issues with updating counts and other meta information. Not to speak of the endless (nonsense) conflicts the system detected which I had to resolve manually by clicking hundreds of buttons...

Long story short: I'd like to make Transifex our new and official translation system and shut-down the account on launchpad.

I know, this isn't very nice for all of our translators who we made registering accounts on launchpad not so long ago and who now have to register at yet another platform just to follow us. I admit, launchpad was a mistake and I'd like to correct this mistake rather soon.

So unless there are serious concerns about the move to Transifex, this shall be our new translation system starting in 2013. As a first step, I registered a project at https://www.transifex.com/projects/p/roundcube-webmail. For quality reasons it is set to limited access which means that translators have to apply to become part of a translation team before they can actually start translating. So if you're interested in becoming a member for a certain language team, choose the language from the list and then click on "Join team" on the upper right part of the overview page.

Thanks to all the people who contributed to Roundcube either as developers, translators, testers or in any other way. It's fun to move the project forward and I hope you'll all stick with us in 2013.

Happy new year, everybody!

~Thomas