Lost in translation

Rails i18n web interface

Translate your apps with pleasure (sort of...) and for free. It's simple i18n web interface, build on top of twitter bootstrap, that one may find helpful in translating app by non-technicals.

Highly inspired by Copycopter by thoughtbot.

Features

Runs with your app - no need for external services
Support for array types, (ie. date.abbr_day_names)
Versioning translations - you can always check, how value did look like in past
Possibility to synchronize translations between environments or apps
Easy to install - works as an engine, comes with simple generator
You can always export all translations to plain old YAML file
Has build in wysiwyg editor (jQuery TE)
Some possibilities of translating apps directly, inline in frontend

Screenshots

Check wiki: Screenshots

Frontend inline translation

Frontend inline translation gets enabled in three steps:

define Lit.euthentication_verification setting. It has to be symbol, to wchich you're app will respond with either true or false, and not redirect (like ie :authenticate_user? is doing
include Lit::FrontendHelper in your ApplicationController
add required assets to layout via lit_frontend_assets function (add it somewhere within <head></head>.

There are two gotchas:

You have to call translations using t() or translate(), not I18n.t which is not (yet?) hooked
Once enabled, all translations be rendered inside <span /> tag, what may break your layout (ie if you're using translated values as button values or as placeholders, ete). To avoid that add skip_lit: true to t() call.

So... again - what is it and how to use it?

Lit is Rails engine - it runs in it's own namespace, by default it's avaulable under /lit. It provides UI for managing translations of your app.

Once you call I18n.t() function from your views, Lit is asked whether it has or not proper value for it. If translation is present in database and is available for Lit, it's served back. If it does not exists, record is automatically created in database with initial value provided in default option key. If default key is not present, value nil is saved to database. When app is starting, Lit will preload all keys from your local config/locale/*.yml files - this is why app startup may take a while.

To optimize translation key lookup, Lit can use different cache engines. For production with many workers redis is suggested, for local development hash will be fine (hash is stored in memory, so if you have many workers and will update translation value in backend, only one worker will have proper translation in it's cache - db will be updated anyway).

Keys ending with _html have auto wysiwyg support.

You can also export translations using rake task

$ rake lit:export

You may also give it extra env variables to limit the export results.

$ LOCALES=en,de rake lit:export

Installation

Add lit gem to your Gemfile

gem 'lit'

For Ruby < 1.9 use gem 'lit', '= 0.2.4', as next versions introduced new ruby hash syntax.

run bundle install
run installation generator bundle exec rails g lit:install (for production/staging environment redis is suggested as key value engine. hash will not work in multi process environment)
After doing above and restarting app, point your browser to http://app/lit
Profit!

You may want to take a look at generated initializer in config/initializers/lit.rb and change some default configuration options.

0.2 -> 0.3 upgrade guide

TODO

On-site live translations

Include Lit::FrontendHelper in your ApplicationController

include Lit::FrontendHelper

In you layout file include lit assets

<% if admin_user_signed_in? %>
  <%= lit_frontend_assets %>
<% end %>

You're good to go - now log in to lit (if required) and open your frontend in seperate tab (to have session persisted). On the bottom-right of your page you should see "Enable / disable lit highlight" - after enabling it you'll be able to click and translate phrases directly in your frontend

Storing request info

TODO

ToDo

~~Versioning~~
~~API~~
~~Synchronization between environments~~
Rewrite initializer
~~Rewrite exporter (which is now code from copycopter)~~
~~Support for array types (ie. date.abbr_day_names)~~
~~Generator~~
~~Support for wysiwyg~~
~~Better cache~~
~~Support for other key value providers (ie. Redis does not support Array types in easy way)~~ (not applicable, as array storage works now with redis).
Integration with ActiveAdmin
Support for Proc defaults (like in I18n.t('not_exising_keys', default: lambda{|_, options| 'text'}) )

Testing

For local testing Appraisal gem comes into play, run tests via: bundle exec appraisal rails-4.2 rake test.

Please remember to edit test/dummy/config/database.yml file

License

Lit is free software, and may be redistributed under the terms specified in the MIT-LICENSE file.

lappi-lynx / lit