The Juggernaut: Private beta is now live'

Working in the software business means stretch times and lull times. Some people can’t handle it, and non-geek friends (aka “Normal people”) wonder if it’s worth the trouble. Some of us, though, are from that breed who are thrilled from the excitement of a long marathon to make a release, or ship an important milestone on time and all the nice feelings that go with this moment!

Today marks the end of such a stretch time for us. We’ve been working frantically towards making the first rather stable release of our new Django-based branch to continue refining and building out the Transifex translation management system. Codenamed Juggernaut, this milestone comes right when it was supposed to, carrying over a number of features or bringing the following improvements over the existing Transifex 0.3.2 release.

• Tracking of any number of VCS repositories, hosted on any networked system.
• Support for multiple components for each project/package: tracking multiple VCS branches, multiple domains (ui, docs, website), etc.
• Support for all major open source versioning systems: Mercurial, Git, CVS, Subversion, Bazaar
• Automatic statistics calculation for PO and intltool files.
• Direct downloading of msgmerged PO/T files
• Support for Project Collections (eg. GNOME) and Releases (eg. GNOME 2.28).
• OpenID authentication
• Open user registration
• Extensible system to hook-up with other authentication backends (DB, LDAP, etc)
• RSS feed for any page in the system
• Tagging of resources, to allow ease of navigation and grouping.
• Notifications for new projects and components

Here’s a list of what’s on our plate right now:

• File Submissions: This is the one major feature still missing from the Django mainline branch. The relevant functionality is being rewritten and the code cleaned up so that it allows for easier maintenance in the future. This is the major missing piece of our upcoming 0.5 release, which should be ready to serve in a few weeks.
• A public launch of Transifex.com. We prefer to be a little cautious before making a public release, in order to get some good feedback and make sure everything is in great shape for Public Beta. We’re currently limiting this to a targeted audience of good friends and colleagues who won’t mind the few kinks we are bound to fix before unleashing it to the world in 2 weeks from now. That said, if you are one of those brave souls always living on the cutting edge and promise to be a good guy, drop us a note and we can give you access.

Looking at the clock it’s almost 05:30am. And until the next stretch in our push for Genesis (our public beta) in a couple of weeks we probably deserve a couple of easy days to regain some strength.

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