Easyling Release Notes - 2016 April

April has brought us a new tradition in Easyling: event favicons - following in Google’s footsteps, we have decided to change our browser tab icon from time to time, and April 1 was just one occasion. But jokes aside, we were hard at work and finished the month with several new features to use in your projects. These include the ability to create one-shot regular expression filters during crawls, we’ve reworked the Work Package interface, and we’ve added the (beta!) ability to run an on-the-fly search-and-replace on the remote content or to apply a regular expression to select content to be translated. See the full details after the jump!

Maybe the most powerful feature this month is the ability to define a one-shot regular expression before a crawl in initiated. Each URL we discover will be checked against this regular expression and if it matches, the URL is discarded - it is not excluded, but skipped during the crawl. In the same vein, we have released an ability to define a maximum number of iteration rounds: you can override the default limit of 16 with one of your own choosing, to determine the number of “hops” the crawler will make on the site (1 means re-visiting the existing pages only; 2 means existing pages plus all the links on those pages). The feature was added to support the incremental, iterative approach of discovering new websites.

The Work Package interface was also reworked: no longer do you have to manually request the next batch of work packages when looking for something, since our new infiniscroll-interface makes sure the next batch is loaded when the bottom of the screen is reached.

We’ve also added a new beta ability (without UI yet, but already functional): a regular expression can be applied on the source content, and an on-the-fly search-and-replace executed, altering the content forming the basis of the translation. Additionally, we can now select part of the page to be translated, based on a regular expression. Unlike class or ID-based exclusions, this is not restricted to a given element, but can be applied anywhere on a page - provided it can be reliably selected for with a regex (anything in the capture group of the regex will be selected for translation, wherever it is in the source code).

These two features are already live on the server, but no UI has been created yet. We are happy to configure them for you, if your project needs these, though!

And with that, April came to a close. Following closely was Labor Day, however, and we are still working on new features, so stay tuned in May as well!