This month was that of holidays for multiple members of our team as well as for fixing bugs. Despite that, we released a couple of new things. The one I’m more excited about is that Ignore queries are now considered when translating resources but passing the current target language to the server in a cookie is cool too. You can read all details after the jump.

Resources and Ignore queries

If you have a webshop and have many colours of the same item, the difference is usually signalled via a query. That means that you’d have https://examplewebshop.com/1-42-scale-rc-car?colour=red and https://examplewebshop.com/1-42-scale-rc-car?colour=blue. When you open one of these pages, the product image is shown in the correct colour. The textual content, however, is identical, so it makes sense to treat them as the same page. Ignore queries was created to solve this. Just add colour and these two pages will be considered as one. This way, you can avoid having tons of similar pages in your Pages list.

Note: Ignore queries isn’t retroactive. Elements already in the Pages list won’t be removed. It just ensures that new ones aren’t added.

In June, we expanded this behaviour to include Resources as well. This is useful, for example, if you have the hash of the resource in a query parameter. This hash can change if the resource is changed slightly on the original site. However, following every minor change could become a daunting task, especially if the client makes a lot of them, so it makes sense to just ignore it.

As this is a breaking change, it is introduced only on new projects by default. However, we can change existing projects to have this behaviour, just drop us a line at support@easyling.com.

Target language cookie

WordPress has some extensions that rely heavily on cookies. To enable correct operation for such extensions, we can now send the current target language in the Cookie header as _translationproxytargetlanguage. You’ll be able to enable it via a checkbox under Advanced settings → Serving settings. We initially used this feature in combination with an extension to display a warning that the content on a site is Machine translated, but the possibilities are endless. What will you use it for?

Improved language selector

Have you ever found yourself in a situation when you want to add the language selector to your website but not all target languages are ready just yet? I certainly have. In such a scenario, the recent improvements we made to the language selectors we provide will be invaluable: only those languages will show up where the translations are available.

Miscellaneous

This is where I usually add a pun or crack a joke about how it’s always the same bullet point list at the end of every month’s release notes. However, today, I’m drawing a blank. Sorry about that. Anyway, here is the list of smaller improvements we made:

• We fixed a bug where some HTML pages would incorrectly be added to the Resources section.
• We don’t want crawler bots to visit the preview pages because they aren’t ready yet. More drastic measures were added to avoid that.
• We fixed a bug that prevented Linguists from accessing the Pages list.
• A fix was added that restored functionality of the Recurring crawls section.
• When we responded with a 410 error page, we’d still have 403 Forbidden in the title due to a bug. We squashed it.
• We fixed an edge case where the JavaScript translation engine would handle staging domains incorrectly while translating images.