Stories from August 2008

Now offline for two weeks

Posted on Tuesday, August 26, 2008

I'm offline and pretty much unavailable by e-mail or the forums for the next two weeks as I'm on vacation. I will periodically check my e-mail but I almost certainly won't get a chance to reply until I get back as the whole point is to get away from it all!

I will however still be able to deal with new purchases though it may take me a little longer than the usual 24 hours to respond.

Hopefully, I'll be back, refreshed and ready to go on the 11th of September so see you then!

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Pixaria 2.5 Now Available

Posted on Sunday, August 24, 2008

I'm very excited to announce that Pixaria 2.5 is now available for all registered users of Pixaria 2.0 and above. This release includes a couple of minor bug fixes and enhancements but the main addition is full support for multiple languages on the software front end.

The process of converting all the existing templates to make them capable of being localised (translated) has taken a long time to complete but hopefully it will be worth the wait as there are already people working on translations into French, German and Dutch.

When upgrading to version 2.5, you will notice that almost every front end template in /resources/templates_default/ has been changed since the last version. While it may appear that you need to replace any custom templates you have created for your site, this should not be necessary and existing theme customisations should work perfectly well with the new templates without any modification.

I've posted full details of how to go about translating Pixaria on the documentation wiki so if you're keen to have a go and snag yourself a free Pixaria license, why not have a go.

As usual, registered users can request the upgrade files by e-mailing me at upgrade@pixaria.com.

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Translation progress update

Posted on Sunday, August 24, 2008

So far, I've had a couple of offers of assistance in translating Pixaria into other languages and we thought it would be a good idea to post some details here to avoid duplication...

The languages currently being worked on are:

French - Frederic Sune
Dutch - Christian Titeca
German - Adrian Wackernah

If you'd like to work on a new translation, you can find all the details in the online documentation here:

http://www.pixaria.com/wiki/TranslatingPixaria/

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Translation guide, files now available

Posted on Thursday, August 21, 2008

I'm pleased to announce that an introductory guide to translating Pixaria Gallery is now available.

The new documentation topic contains guidelines for how to go about creating a new translation, links to download the localised string files from version 2.5 and details of how to submit a new translation for inclusion with the Pixaria Gallery package.

Don't forget that anyone submitting a new localisation which gets included with Pixaria will receive a free license so get cracking..!

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Multiple Language Update

Posted on Sunday, August 17, 2008

I've now completed the process of converting the front-end templates of Pixaria to provide the ability to translate them into languages other than English. This has been a huge amount of work as the 100 template files have all had to be individually converted by hand which has resulted in two English language files (one for web text and one for e-mail text) containing 826 strings of text.

I will be publishing the English language strings file in the next day or two so that those who are interested can begin work on translating the software into other languages. Watch this space for more news coming soon..!

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Pixaria Update

Posted on Sunday, August 17, 2008

The Pixaria website has now moved to a new home with Demon Virtual Servers in the UK. I'd been having some issues with the performance of my Dedicated Virtual server with MediaTemple for some time and finally decided to stump up a bit more for faster hosting here in the UK.

I'm really pleased with how this has worked out as I'd used Demon for hosting before but hadn't realised how good they are until I tried alternatives that look cheaper but either have a poor level of service or charge extra for even basic features offered by Demon.

In other news, I want to let everyone know that I will be uncontactable between the 24th of August and 13th of September as I take a two week vacation. If you're planning to purchase Pixaria during this time, please complete the purchase before I go or else hold off until I get back as I will not be able to respond to purchase requests during this time.

I'm hoping to release Pixaria 2.5 before I go away but I'm not sure if this is a good idea as it's a fairly major upgrade due to having added support for localisation so I've not made up my mind yet. Watch this space for more details...

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Localisation Update

Posted on Wednesday, August 6, 2008

I'm very pleased to report that I'm on the final few templates in my quest to make the front end of Pixaria fully localisable (translatable into other languages). This is an important development as nearly half of all Pixaria users are from non English speaking countries and the ability to quickly and easily translate the software without going into the templates is a very important consideration.

Because the localisation process involves editing templates, the update which includes the changes will include modifications to every front end template in the software as all user readable text is replaced by short codes for the language conversion.

As an example, consider this bit of HTML from the lightbox template index.lightbox/lightbox.share.sent.tpl and how it looks before and after the process:

Before:


<p>A link to your lightbox has been e-mailed to {$name}.</p>

After:


<p>##LIGHTBOX_63##</p>

The text inside the two HTML paragraph tags is now stored in a PHP file for English language text (called en_GB.php) like this:


$strings['LIGHTBOX_63'] = "A link to your lightbox has been e-mailed to \$name.";

If you've made modifications to the front end templates of your site and you want to make use of the new localisation capabilities, you will need to bear these changes in mind when you upgrade and make sure you check the template comparison tool.

Currently, the only templates remaining to be converted are some of the store and cart files. Once this work is done in the next week or two, I'll be good to go with a public release that includes the changes.

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Website downtime

Posted on Monday, August 4, 2008

Some of you may have noticed some interruptions in the service on this website over the last few days. This is due to some changes I'm making to my hosting platform.

Hopefully there shouldn't be too many more interruptions but if there are, please bear with me as the changes should all be complete in the next few days.

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