Magento the last and most promising open source e-commerce platform beeing developed, but it has some critical points, such as translations.

Magento (which is still in beta) is releasing a bunch of CSV files containing 2 columns, the original string is the first, the translated string is the second. When a new string is added to the english codebase all translation files must be updated and delivered to translators, which have many difficulties merging these new files with the one they were working on.

This approach isn’t effective, brings many efforts and could lead to corruption between translation files.

Ok, critics are over, now let’s be constructive.

When we had to build the new translation system for P4A we did deep researches to find out how many free translation services where out there, result? We found a few but only one was good: Launchpad Rosetta.

Did you know Launchpad Rosetta before? I think you know it. It’s the software being used by Ubuntu and thousands of other FLOSS projects.

Developers create a POT file with the strings to be translated, they upload that to Rosetta and all languages are automatically updated and merged in the codebase, with no effort at all.

Magento guys, I think this is the only way (ok, someone could also build an “ad hoc” translation software but Rosetta is already there…) to fix all the translation issues and to be sure that all translations will be ready before the 1.0 release.

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which is maintained by me :)

http://it.magentocommerce.com

This project will give everyone some great satisfactions in the near future.

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Many blogs talked about that in the latest 2 days, while a was taking a break, but I can’t stop myself for writing a headline about this news from ars technica.

I hope that this unification idea will go on and complete successfully, it should happen for many other projects, I also hope that this will be taken as an example of the right direction for companies that want to work with open projects (ok Apple is not a saint…)

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People are claiming that Wubuntu brings Ubuntu into your browser, this is totally wrong! Wubuntu is just a web application that tries to emulate the graphic theme of Ubuntu, nothing to do with the real operating system behind.

I think wubuntu is a good work (also if I don’t like web desktop projects) but it should be clearly stated that Wubuntu is not related to the real Ubuntu! This could confuse users and bring bad results for Ubuntu.

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Movable type is opening part of the code, but:

• there will still be 2 versions, the open one and the commercial one
• the open version will be released in Q3 2007

So why the big announce now? I think it’s to get attention, I heard about some big MT users that were about to move to wordpress but now MT says “hey wait wait, you want open source, we’ll give you open source” and now they’ve time to evaluate feedback.

Personally I like double licensed software but only when the only different thing is the license, anyway a bit of open source competition will be a good thing.

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