Easyling Release Notes July, 2021

Aug 3, 2021 - Easyling.com

We’ve had the usual amount of rain this month in Hungary if we are looking at the average. What we didn’t expect is that all that rain would fall on one day. Despite some minor rainwater-related incidents, we released some awesome new features this month. It’s now possible to set whether a page should be translated based on its HTTP response code, XML files can now be added to Snapshots and we shut off the old Dashboard in favour of the Dashboard 2.0. Read the full article for the details!

Farewell, old Dashboard

When we started Easyling, the Dashboard used state-of-the-art technology and the design looked cool. However, after all these years, it looks like it came straight out from the 2010s. To combat that, we started work on the new Dashboard 2.0 roughly 3 years ago. It uses state-of-the-art technology and the new material design looks cool. During this transition period, we migrated the features over to the Dashboard 2.0 one-by-one. For quite some time now, you didn’t even need to use the old one but it was still available.

The Dashboard 2.0

This month, it was finally time for the Dashboard 2.0 to shine and we disabled the old Dashboard. We understand that the Dashboard 2.0 may feel strange to some users who are used to the old one. If you are such a user, please contact us at support@easyling.com so that we can arrange training sessions where we show you around the new user interface and to let us know what you miss from the old Dashboard.

Response code actions

This new feature allows you to override page exclusion based on the HTTP response’s status code. This is useful for example if you have a project where

  • You want to keep the page list tidy so Page freeze and Handle unknown pages as externalized are both enabled.

  • The client wants you to translate the Not Found page (every 404 response).

The issue is that if a page is externalized, it wasn’t translated. So if you wanted to translate them, you’d turn Page freeze off, automatically add them to the Pages list and translate the segments. But this solution pollutes the Pages list with elements that don’t exist so it’s not ideal.

Alternatively, if the client is willing to cooperate, instead of 404s, the client could redirect to a Not Found page that you translated. This is a hacky workaround so it’s not ideal either.

With this new feature, you can specify that 404 responses should always be treated as if they were included on the project so they are always translated. Not only that, to ensure flexibility, you can specify response ranges and the action related to them (default, translate, exclude).

You can enable this feature in Publish → Global settings → Response code actions.

Response code actions

XML files in Snapshots

This feature will be very important for sites that rely on static XML files. These can now be added to your Origin Snapshots as well. As you probably know already, Snapshots are used to prevent the bleed through of content in the original language. They essentially allow you to freeze the translated site and ignore any update to the original one. You can find the checkbox for it in the Snapshot settings.

Snapshot settings

Dropbox import archival

Our Dropbox integration helps Project managers because they don’t need to individually upload files to be processed. Instead they can just drop them in the import folder to make it available for import in Easyling (or just import it automatically). However, such an import folder could become difficult to manage once it fills up with tons of XLIFF files during the lifetime of a project.

Additionally, if such a folder would be shared with a new user, Dropbox changes the files, we are notified and start importing them again. This can be especially bad because old translations can be reverted this way if the import process finds the files in the wrong order.

We aim to solve the above-mentioned 2 problems with the update released this month. Once we finish the import process, we’ll move the file out of the import folder to a different one, called archive.

One more thing

Well, more like a few small things:

  • When creating an export ZIP with multiple XLIFF files, empty XLIFF files won’t be generated any more.

  • New bots are allowed to receive stale content: Screaming Frog, AhrefsBot, MJ12bot, and any kind of custom application sending “python-requests” as user-agent.