I just made a small update to the Form Emailer – an old script I wrote a couple of years back. I actually forgot how neat this script was; it was a precursor to Form Tools which automatically emails you (and anyone else) the contents of a web form in whatever format you like. It offers you the option of defining your own email templates, so you can structure the emails however you like. Cool.

Anyway, there was a small issue in which placeholders from the form weren’t being replaced properly. All fixed.

Today was my first day where I was finally settled in Saskatoon, so I was able to catch up on some emails and a little work. I think I’ll enjoy it here, albeit for a mere 9 months. I was undisturbed the entire day and even got a little contract work done. Things should be peaceful in this place.
But here’s the really exciting news…

Form Tools 1.5.0 Private Beta Released! (Language Packs)

Now available! Unlike previous Private Beta versions, I’m only making this available to translators who wish to volunteer to translate the UI. This version represents a major refactoring of the code to support multiple languages.

If you’d like to help translate, send me an email here. So far I’ve had people volunteer for Dutch, Portuguese, Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), Spanish, Italian, French, Farsi (Persian), German and Polish. A good start for testing the software.

Open Translate Beta Released!

I’ve finally opened the doors to a handful of translators who will use it to translate Form Tools. It’s VERY basic right now, and missing a front-end. This has been a loooong project, and rather than put it off even longer I decided to push it live.

It’s pretty cool, actually. Other than for fixing bugs, I could walk away from it if need be: all translations made through opentranslate.org are automatically zipped up and exported every hour to the Form Tools site for download by the Form Tools beta testers. In theory, the translation component of Form Tools will be entirely self-managed by the translators themselves. I can worry about other things!

A very satisfying day indeed.

Apologies to those people who’ve emailed me over the last couple of days. I’ve been busy packing, getting ready for the move to Saskatchewan on the 22nd. I’m going to be incommunicado until the coming weekend, but I’ll try and get back to you all then.

All the best!

In the upcoming month we’ll be releasing a new Private Beta of Form Tools featuring (drum roll, please)… multiple language support! All aspects of the Form Tools UI are now localized – display text, notifications, confirmations, error messages and even dates.

In preparation for this exciting event (well, I find it exciting!), if anyone would be interested in helping translate Form Tools to their native language – or even just help review existing translations – please drop me a line at ben.keen@gmail.com with your name and language you speak. Once things are ready I’ll set you up a user account and provide further instructions.

Andrew Jakubowski and I have moved Open Translate to a dedicated server, and we’re just putting the finishing touches on the translator pages.

Looking forward to hearing from you!

This was a small job I did for Vancouver Pro Musica, a local non-profit group, at the behest of a friend who sits on the board. I was familiar with Vancouver Pro Musica for over a decade due to their yearly Sonic Boom festival, held in Vancouver, BC. I had attended several of their concerts during my music degree at UVic and was quite pleased to be given the opportunity to update their site.

Vancouver Pro Musica was originally formed in 1984 as a group of local composers with a chamber ensemble-in-residence. After two years as a performing ensemble, the organization took a new direction and became mainly a presenter of contemporary BC music. By 1987, the first “Festival of Composers”, now known as Sonic Boom, was initiated. Over the years, this annual festival has become not only the centrepiece of Pro Musica season, but also a fundamental catalyst for the development of emerging and experimental composers in British Columbia.

Due to the wide ranging requirements for the site, I picked Drupal as the content management system (CMS) as the main engine. Drupal is a highly extensible platform written in PHP and MySQL with hundreds of modules available to let you do just about anything. There are many advantages to using Drupal over other solutions, but most importantly, it always leaves the door open for future expansion.

These were the features that were realized for the website:

• Full content management through a simple UI
• Options to upload PDF, MP3, images and more
• WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor to let the client add HTML code without actually knowing any HTML
• Image Gallery
• Streaming media (MP3)
• Mailing lists (internal and public)
• Contact Us page
• RSS Syndication of articles
• Archiving option to hide and catalogue old articles

I finally released 1.4.7, which puts to rest a number of old bugs as well as includes a neat new feature or two. Click here for more information on the Form Tools site.

Next step is to update the online demo… erk. The online demo is basically just a modded version of the standard code, which  prevents certain functionality for demoing purposes. The pain is that those mods sure make upgrading a pain. Ho hum. I’ll try and work on it today.

On a different note, 1.5.0 looks really good – I’m extremely pleased. I think the language support works considerably better than a lot of other programs out there (I won’t name names…). Any Form Tools user will be allowed to change their UI language by simply choosing the option from a dropdown list. Adding new languages will be as simple as uploading a file. Since the language files are relatively small, I’m going to include all final, polished translations in the core build – as soon as they come out. That will reduce the fuss for people wanting Form Tools in their language.

Also, depending on how things go, I may incorporate a couple of customizations that I recently did for a client. They requested the addition of FCKeditor for long text fields, to allow rich-text editing of submissions. It’s a nice feature, and I can see it be of use to a lot of people, but I’m not totally sure whether or not to add it. First, it would substantially increase the zipfile size, secondly I’m still not convinced FCKeditor is a better choice than tinyMCE. I personally prefer the look and feel of tinyMCE, and I certainly prefer working with it. However, for my client, FCKeditor was definitely a better fit.

I’ll certainly be adding a rich-text editor at some point, but I think it will require a little more thought.