Long time, no blog, one could say. Well, let’s mend this and talk all the exciting things that happened for Weblate during this window of radio silence.
Lower down, there are two major releases described. First, we would like to share what brought the delays. There were some health challenges in the team, which forced us to reorganize the workload for a while. Quite happy to say: all is well now!
Community members that asked for approval of the gratis Libre plan for their projects this year experienced this the most—by waiting. Nothing was unintentionally removed; we extended the trial period, and they needed to live in it. We truly appreciate that Weblate is the tool of choice for bringing their software closer to its users for so many FOSS maintainers; many of you already have multiple projects up and translating this way. You are always welcome to add more and to contribute to existing projects!
Currently, there is no ticket at Weblate Care waiting anymore, hosting-related or any other. We are also back on Mastodon with a regular presence, pleased to hear from you and boost your project’s localization efforts. While there, please remember that community questions, support inquiries, and feature requests are still better answered at the designated channels linked in the profile info there.
One FOSS story we want to share this time is OpenSUSE! Their world-wide community, supported by the SUSE company, got on board with our happy users of dedicated instances. What does it mean? We provide and manage their Weblate server so they can invest their valuable time into their services instead of looking after their localization platform. openSUSE have been localizing with Weblate for more than ten years already, running Weblate on their premises. The migration was quick and smooth; you can only recognize the leap (from the older version) thanks to loads of new features and splendid performance. That’s it. Welcome, chameleons!
Together with Fedora, which has enjoyed their dedicated instance since 2019, we are wondering when more deb players will join the group with many other kind members on Hosted Weblate like AlmaLinux, AsteroidOS, CalyxOS, and VanillaOS. Or start self-hosting like Elementary OS. We can definitely say that Hosted Weblate is already popular for many GNOME and KDE apps alike.
Releases–5.5 in April, 5.6 in June, and 5.6.2, worth to be mentioned, today!
With what presents inside?
- Many API improvements
- Add-ons can now be project- or site-wide. That is a massive improvement to the workflows of some admins!
- Component alerts, informing you about the things that you can improve, are now quicker. No daily generation anymore; on-demand!
- Activity log for add-ons! Check the work report of these tireless robots.
- Improved range selection for the reports. So you can better see what your humans did. And say thanks!
- Plenty of fixes. No proper software project is without bugs. And one role model that we want to show is sweetly named CVE-2024-39303. As we are libre to the bone, all is disclosed. There was a chance to misuse this while uploading ZIP files with translations, but we know about none. Now that it’s fixed, all admins have one more reason to upgrade!
Team is growing
We have a new contributor on the Weblate team; shout out to Paul! He’s been working with us for some time already and delivered some lovely improvements to the Weblate backend! Get excited for 5.7 with Paul's work!
New hosting plans
After two years of conscientious consideration of the pricing changes to our hosting plans, we made it live. Since the start of professional Weblate hosting services, there were two metrics: the total numbers of source strings and of languages used. This was not always the best-suiting for all the different types of projects; some were pushed to an upper tier just by one metric, while having a low amount of the other. We had been discussing their feelings with such projects, made some tweaks, and wanted a fair, permanent solution for all. After experimenting with hosted words, which would not be fair to all users either (it’s very Latin-letter focused), we made hosted strings the only metric. A string can be quite different in length, but it is universal and fair to all. So count your source strings, multiply that by languages, and that’s it. Or check <your Weblate>/stats and decide. If your plan suits you, you can stay with it. If the new model is more fair and cheaper for you, you can switch. Both ways of counting enable Weblate to provide you services and evolve.
To finish with something quite significant, we want to announce the birth of the Weblate company!
We stay committed to keep being a responsible, sustainable, libre, and self-funded-growing company, so we started Weblate s.r.o., the firm established in Czechia. It will soon become the legal entity providing all the Weblate services instead of Michal Čihař, our founder, who has been doing it as a registered business person since the start. There is no personal exit of people providing you the services; quite the opposite, as our team is growing so we can raise the standard of the services, and boost the development. This means that customers and users will get new Terms of Service and Privacy Policy in the upcoming months; the values will be kept the same, and we remain to be libre-first project. Why such a step-up? Weblate serves projects and companies, large and small, all around the world. As a firm, it is easier to understand and do business together for everyone involved.
If you read it all the way to here, you deserve congratulations! We will deliver you more reading in August with 5.7, which promises interesting new features. Until then, happy Weblating!
