Despite the political tension rising and an armed conflict erupting in a neighbouring country, we’ve been fairly productive this month. We worked on the Pages list on the Dashboard and our JavaScript translation solution, CREST. Additionally, we added a ton of bugfixes (and a couple of bugs, just for good measure). Read the full article for the details!

Page list exports

We used to offer two kinds of Page list exports. One was an Excel spreadsheet and the other a simplified CSV version for processing via scripts. Unfortunately, on large projects, Excel exports become unwieldy both to generate and to use. Computers completely freezing up when opening a large spreadsheet in Excel is a serious issue that we addressed this month. The new system offers three options:

• The Excel option is available, but it is limited to projects with less than 1000 pages. Opening the resulting spreadsheet shouldn’t crash your machine any more.
• We added a new CSV option that has the same columns that the Excel spreadsheet. If you are confident that you can process it, feel free to use it the same way you used the Excel spreadsheet before.
• Simplified CSV - this is what we used to just call CSV. We just renamed it on the UI, nothing else is changed.

The two CSV exports are available to projects of any size.

Script injection in client side translation

Our JavaScript-based translation solution, CREST, is getting more and more powerful with every update. This month, we enabled JavaScript link injection. This can be extremely useful when you need to make changes to the site after it was published. With JavaScript injection, you can change any behaviour you may want to. This can be perfect to add features such as localised site search or a pop-up letting users know that they are leaving the translated section of a partially translated site. Or you can just fix existing features or do layout adjustment. The limit is your programming prowess.

Note that we don’t yet have an editor for this feature on the Dashboard. If you wish to give it a try, please contact us at support@easyling.com.

Folder and page information

The pages list can display important information of the folders and pages in the sidebar on the right. These tidbits, such as the Approximate page count in a folder can be invaluable for adjusting the scope of a project with a large amount of content. For example, the blog section can be as much as 60% of a site’s content. In such a case, it may be wise to exclude it to save costs for the site owner.

We received feedback that this feature is fairly unknown and as such isn’t used to its full potential. To combat that, we added it to the context menu too for easy access and better discoverability.

Some additional changes

Our customary section of smaller improvements can’t be skipped this month either. There are almost a dozen of them this time:

• We adjusted the Sharing settings user interface to fully reflect the underlying system. Previously, we had a few roles that were displayed slightly differently. We hoped that it would simplify the user experience, but it ended up causing more confusion.
• We fixed an issue where viewing and downloading the usage statistics didn’t require the same level of authorisation.
• Our security-related headers were adjusted so that SlimView, the in-context preview that can be integrated into third-party applications, may run again.
• We broke and fixed the Workbench. It was down for less than a day.
• When you create a Work package, you can enter a list of pages to limit its scope. Due to infrastructure constraints, the parameters of Work packages are limited in size. We added a warning when you are close to this limit and disabled the generation of Work packages if you exceed it - the generation process would fail anyway, it’s better to not even start it.
• In the Path prefix overrides section, when you try to define a prefix by entering a star (*) at the end, the page/prefix selector is now automagically changed to prefix.
• Parameter names _wpnonce and redirect_to were added to ignore query parameters for new projects. These parameters can be safely ignored as they don’t change the content of the page.
• Fixed a couple of edge cases that caused the recurring crawl section to display incorrect information.
• We fixed a minor issue where the input fields in the Profile settings section weren’t aligned.
• We found and fixed a syntax error in the nginx configuration that we provide during the Subdirectory publishing process. In nginx, comments start with #, not //. The example code now reflects that.
• After a successful pre-translate, if you start a new one, the progress indicator will now correctly reflect the state of the languages. The green checkmarks just used to be stuck there in this case.