Introducing Speedy Translate for Joomla
The New Year is coming and we wish you a New Year as cheerful and happy as you are.
In the recent months, we’ve been working on many exiting new features for Solidres which will be available in the beginning of 2017. But let save that for 2017, let talk about our brand new Joomla extension: Speedy Translate.
As the name says, this is a dedicated Joomla extension with the ultimate goal to make translating work in Joomla easier and speedier. Our motivation to create this extension is from the fact that building a multilingual site in Joomla is somewhat a confusing and time consuming task, even for an experienced Joomla users, let alone new users. If you have built a multilingual site with Joomla, you will probably agree with us.
Speedy Translate will help you to translate static content and dynamic content in Joomla easier and speedier. For those who does not know about them, static content refers to all content in your Joomla site that are not stored inside your database but in your file system like language files while dynamic content is stored inside your database like your articles.
To translate static content, you will need to edit the language file in INI format (.ini). To translate dynamic content, with Joomla! there are two popular options:
- Option 1: using the core Joomla multilingual feature by defining content’s associations. Now each content will be assigned a specific language and they are linked with each other via associations, let say you want to translate your article About us in English to Italian, Japanese and German, you will need to create 03 new articles for those languages and associate them with the original About us article, that means now you will have 04 articles for 04 languages. The advantage of this option is that it is built-in feature but it creates a lot of duplications.
- Option 2: using a 3rd Joomla! extension called Falang. This extension takes a different approach and it only allows translate what need to be translate (configured via a file call Content Element), that means there will be less duplication and this is a recommended option.
There are two main hassles when building a multilingual site in Joomla!:
- First, when user need to translate static content like a label, a button text, user has to figure out what INI language is storing it and where is the INI language file stored in the file system. Then user need to edit the INI language file manually, the whole process is not convenient at all. And that is what motivated us to create the feature INI TRANSLATE and the CONTEXT TRANSLATION which you can access above.
- Second, when translating dynamic content, there is no User Interface that allows users to work on multiple languages concurrently. With Speedy Translate’s INLINE TRANSLATION, you will have that ability, it will save time and avoid confusion for users.
Those hassles will be no longer your issues anymore with Speedy Translate, check this page for more screenshot. We have a special 50% discount coupon SPEEDYTRANSLATE for all active Solidres subscribers when you subscribe Speedy Translate, it is valid from today until Jan 15 2017.
Enjoy a great holiday with your family and friends, see you again in 2017!