Tools and code
I spent significantly more time on tool this quarter than in the past, I am also happy to say that Transvision is now a 6 people team and that we will all be at Brussels for the Summit (see my blog post in April). I like it, I like to create the small tools and scripts that make my life or localizers life better.
- Two releases of Transvision (release notes) + some preparatory work for future l20n compatibility
- Created a mini-dashboard for our team so as to help us follow FirefoxOS work
- Wrote the conversion script to convert our Serbian Cyrillic string repository to Serbian Latin (see this blog post)
- Turned my langchecker scripts (key part of the Web Dashboard) into a github project and worked with Flod on improving our management scripts for mozilla.org and fhr. A recent improvement is that we can now import automatically translations done on Locamotion You can see a list of the changes in the release notes.
- Worked on scripts allowing to query bugzilla without using the official API (because the data I want is specific to the mozilla customizations we need for locales), that will probably be part of the Webdashboard soon so as to be able to extract Web localization bugs from multiple components (gist here). Basically I had the idea to use the CSV export feature for advanced search in Bugzilla as a public read-only API :)
- Several python patches to mozilla.org to fix l10n bugs or improve our tools to ship localized pages (Bug 891835, Bug 905165, Bug 904703).
Mozilla.org localization
Since we merged all of our major websites (mozilla.org, mozilla.com, mozilla-europe.org, mozillamessaging.com) under the single mozilla.org domain name two years ago with a new framework based on Django, we have gained in consistency but localization of several backends under one single domain and a new framework slowed us down for a while. I'd say that we are now mostly back to the old mozilla.com speed of localization, lots of bugs and features were added to Bedrok (nickname of our Django-powered site), we have a very good collaboration with the webdev/webprod teams on the site and we are more people working on it. I think this quarter localizer felt that a lot more work was asked from them on mozilla.org, I'll try to make sure we don't loose locales on the road, this is a website that hosts content for 90 locales, but we are back to speed with tons of new people!
- Mozilla.org home page is now l10n-friendly and we just shipped it in 28 languages. Depending on your locale, visitor see custom content (news items, calls for contribution or translation...)
- Several key high traffic pages (about products updade) are now localized and maintained at large scale (50+ locales)
- Newsletter center and newsletter subscription process largely migrated to Bedrock and additional locales supported (but there is still work to do there)
- The plugincheck web application is also largely migrated to Bedrock (61 locales on bedrock, about 30 more to migrate before we can delete the older backend and maintain only one version)
- The contribute page scaled up tp 28 locales with local teams of volunteers behind answering people that contact us
- Firefox OS consumer and industry sub-sites released/updated for +10 locales, with some geoIP in addition to locale detection for tailored content!
- Many small updates to other existing pages and templates
Community growth
This quarter, I tried to spend some time looking for localizers to work on web content as well as acompanying volunteers that contact us. I know that I am good at finding volunteers that share our values and are achievers, unfortunately I don't have that much time to spend on that. Hopefully I will be able to spend a few days on that every quarter because we need to grow and we need to grow with the best open source contributors! :)
- About 20 people got involved for the folowing locales: French, Czech, Catalan, Slovenian, Tamil, Bengali, Greek, Spanish (Spain variant), Swedish. Several became key localizers and will be at the Mozilla summit
- A couple of localizers moved from mozilla.org localization to product localization where their help was more needed, I helped them by finding new people to replace them on web localization and/or empowering existing community members to avoid any burn-out
- I spent several days in a row specifically helping the Catalan community as it needed help to scale since they now also do all the mobile stuff. I opened a #mozilla-cat IRC channel and found 9 brand new volunteers, some of them professional translators, some of them respected localizers from other open source projects. I'll probably spend some more time to help them next quarter to consolidate this growth. I may keep this strategy every quarter since it seems to be efficient (look for localizers in general and also help one specific team to grow and organize itself to scale up)
Other
- Significant localization work for Firefox Health Report, both Desktop (shipped) and Mobile versions (soon to be shipped)
- Lots of meetings for lots of different projects for next quarter :)
- Two work weeks, one focused on tooling in Berlin, one focused on training my new colleagues Peying and Francesco (but to be honest, Francesco didn't need much of it thanks to his 10 years of involvement in Mozilla as a contributor :) )
- A lot of work to adjust my processes to work with my new colleague Francesco Lodolo (also an old-timer in the community, he is the Italian Firefox localizer). Kudos to Francesco for helping me with all of the projects! Now I can go on holidays knowing that i have a good backup :)
French community involvement
- In the new Mozilla paris office I organized a meeting with the LinuxFR admins, because I think it's important to work with the rest of the Open Source ecosystem
- With Julien Wajsberg (Gaia developer) we organized a one day meeting with the Dotclear community, a popular blogging platform alternative to Wordpress in France (purely not-for-profit), because we think it's important to work with project that build software that allows people to create content on the Web
- Preparation of more open source events in the Paris office
- We migrated our server (hosting Transvision, womoz.org, mozfr.org...) to the latest Debian Stable, which finally brings us a decent modern version of PHP (5.4). We grew our admin community to 2 more people with Ludo and Geb :). Our server flies!
In a nutshell, a very busy quarter! If you want to speak about some of it with me, I will be at the Mozilla Summit in Brussels this week :)