Test drive with us!

We suggest you read the details and tips here, but if you'd like to go ahead and try this out now, just go to http://localize.staging.drupal.org, enter drupal/drupal for the HTTP authentication prompt when requested, then log in with your drupal.org username and password and play around. Have fun and provide us feedback! Thanks for your help.

Looking back a bit

The main translation user interface of localize.drupal.org as we know it today is a result of collaboration between myself and the amazing Young Hahn of Development Seed. His work with the user interface covered making a previously unsexy interface more appealing and useful. However, given how early that was done, we did not know the actual user scenarios of language teams having contributors of all levels.

Looking at the issue queues, the most pressing problem on localize.drupal.org is the "uncontrollable" flow of suggestions. Of course you can call this the success of our web based translation interface. There is a huge number of suggestions coming in. If you look at the numbers, we have over 300.000 translations recorded and over 100.000 suggestions as well in the system. So 25% of the active text in our database is not yet approved or declined.

I've got various requests of both translators and moderators to the effect that the translation user interface is inadequate to handle the suggestions. The UI is very inviting to submit new suggestions, but the existing ones are hidden behind a little hardly visible star:

Additionally, if you click on the suggestion star, the original translation is hidden, so you cannot tell the difference between the two or more pieces of text. Clearly, both to handle existing suggestions and submit new ones, seeing the current translation with all the suggestions listed makes processing the community submissions much easier.

Rethinking the UI

Thankfully, several teams contributed such critical thinking to the localization server user interface and processes, but Konstatin Kaefer of the German team was the most outstanding in terms of user interface suggestions. Instead of minor reorganizations of the existing UI, he decided to tackle the core problem and bravely formed a new approach to text submission and moderation. Instead of inviting people to add and add and add new stuff, the rethought UI puts the existing submissions to the forefront, which helps think up truly valuable contributions instead of starting fresh. Not only that, suggesters and moderators are able to view live diffs of different suggestions submitted. The new user interface for the same language and string looks like this:

Even allowing you to compare and find those little differences (misspelling, style differences, etc) which would otherwise take more time to figure out:

What do the buttons do?

1. The little pencil+arrow buttons open up the relevant text for editing in the "New translation" form field.
2. Single clicking on an item (picking the appropriate radio button) will change the active translation to be that selected string (this will *not* mark any other suggestions declined, except the one you switched from).
3. Double clicking on an item will change the active translation to be that selected string *and* will mark all other suggestions for the same English string declined.
4. You can mark strings declined one-by-one with the red circle buttons.
5. If a suggestion is marked declined with either of the above ways, you'll be able to re-activate it with a reverse arrow icon (until you submit the form, which saves your changes and will not show previously declined strings anymore).
6. You can submit a suggestion by entering text in the "New translation field". If you also want to make it an active translation, you should switch the radio button to it. You'll see live diffs of the entered translation compared to the current translation (make sure you try this out).
7. While user and time submission information is now printed inline (hover above the date to see how long ago that was), information on where things occur is still hidden by default. This can be a very long list of modules and releases, so you should click the "Show occurrences" link specifically to see that.

Unifying moderation, browsing and translation

Another issue with the current user interface was that the browse screen only listed active translations, hiding suggestions from unprivileged users. The moderation screen on the other hand used a very minimal feature set allowing to look up suggestions by all the criteria used on the translation page, but allowing for no comparison of the suggestions, or looking at which active translation they were for. The moderation screen only allowed search in the suggestions while the translation screen only allowed to search in the translations. You could not look for all strings with suggestions containing words your style guide will not allow. So another important effort here was to unify these three screens. And indeed, where there were Browse, Translate and Moderate screens before, we only have a single translate screen.

How does one screen solve the job of all these three existing ones? Well, you get different levels of features depending on your permissions, so if you do not have suggestion submission or moderation features, the translate screen will just degrade to a browse screen. You'll see all suggestions but will not be able to do anything when them. As your permissions widen, you get more and more features.

Supporting moderation gets us some exciting features. As I've said, the moderation screen basically had the same search filters as the translation screen, but it only searched in suggestions. So if we can make the translation interface search in suggestions optionally, we widen its feature set and also allow for the same filtering that the moderation screen had. Given that we show all translations and suggestions now, the search default also changed. Now all user and text searches will look at both translations and suggestions by default. If you'd only like to search in translations (as before), you can pick the "is translation" option from the status items. If you'd like to look in suggestions only (as on the previous moderation page), you can pick the "is suggestion" option:

Search results are emphasizing the actual matched strings with a subtle bezel around the matches. In this case I'm looking for "email". Both source strings matched, but of the three suggestions only two matched:

Test drive with us!

This is a pretty big user interface change, so we thought it would be best to give you a test drive and gather feedback before we roll it out on the live site. Please go ahead and try this out now! Just go to http://localize.staging.drupal.org, enter drupal/drupal for the HTTP authentication prompt when requested, log in with your drupal.org username and password and play around. This staging site is running on a copy of the live database, so whatever data you enter will not persist to the live site. We invite you to try this out, but let's not do anything you'd like to keep for the future. Have fun and provide us feedback! Thanks for your help.

Want to hear more?

Vote on the session about this service and developments in progress for Drupalcon San Francisco: http://sf2010.drupal.org/conference/sessions/bringing-drupal-all-worlds-...