ScrewTurn Wiki now supports 14 languages. They used to be more, but some of them have never been updated since 2.0 (you’re welcome if you care to help).

Handling translations have always been a pain. It’s time-consuming, it’s boring, and translation are quite never up-to-date. Last year we started developing and testing an in-house tool to let volunteers translate STW directly in their web browser, using a custom web application that talked directly with our Subversion repository. The aim was to achieve zero overhead.

As you might have heard, the thing turned out to be quite useful, so we decided to make a product out of it. Well, I’m glad to announce that thanks to Nuno and Pedro, two brave Portuguese contributors, we had our first brand new translation done entirely with Amanuens, starting from .resx files generation to the final commit.

Now, take a look at this figure: the total time we spent in handling this translation is something like 3 minutes. In case we update resource files, the system will automatically highlight changes so translators will know where to look. No more files sent via email.

This will sound like an advertisement, but Amanuens really changed how we handle translations for the better and I’m very, very happy about it. I had to tell someone!

ScrewTurn Wiki 2.0.32 is finally out; a CAPTCHA control has been added to all publicly-available functionalities (namely Edit.aspx, Upload.aspx and Post.aspx), as spam was coming through our Sandbox. I didn’t know whether it was a bot, but I think so because the spam stopped. So far so good.

It turns out that the Web Setup and the Desktop Edition installers didn’t include the Traditional Chinese wiki language (zh-TW). This problems remained undiscovered for 7 months (since version 2.0.20). Apologies for that. Unfortunately, for a few technical reasons, the setup packages are updated manually when new files are added to the application, and the process is incredibly prone to error. I hope we can improve this soon.

I also wanted to inform all of you that, except for emergency patches, version 2.0.32 is going to be the last one of the 2.0.x series, because the development must now focus on the next version, that will be called 3.0 instead of 2.1 (the changes are quite ground-breaking). I’m very excited with the new version, which will include a good bunch of new features such as the long-awaited WYSIWYG editor, an ACL system, namespaces/subwikis and an index-based search engine. Although dates are far from being accurate, I think that version 3.0 Alpha might be out by the end of this month or the beginning of July.

ScrewTurn Wiki 2.0.20 has been released today, and it now includes the Traditional Chinese translation. A couple of fixes are included, but the TIFF problem is not resolved: it seems that TIFF images cannot be displayed in wiki pages (the classic red X appears instead).

The obvious (and wrong) cause seemed at first related to GetFile.aspx, which might have broken MIME types or something. That page, though, correctly handles TIFF files. If you try to open in the browser a TIFF file directly (for example http://…/public/Upload/MyTiff.tif), the browser actually prompts you with the usual file download dialog, asking whether to save or open the file. This happens with Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. I don’t know where the problem is, but it might either be the browsers (all of them!?), IIS (probably not, because GetFile.aspx bypasses IIS’ MIME types) or Windows (in the client, with broken file type associations).

This bug is marked as “Won’t fix” in our bug tracker.

Finally, the Basic Stats Plugin 1.0 has been released, and you can download it as a part of the Plugin Pack. Also take a look at its final appearance here.