It's the final countdown

This project could logically be divided into 3 major parts:

• Phrases recognition
• Translations interface and awards
• Packing

This final stage is about packing, although I have already written both code and blogs about packing this is about something else. This is about sending data from one website to another. This was challenging every step of the way, but I managed to get something I like; And with time to spare. Google Summer of Code is approaching it's end. Today is 'Soft Pencils Down' which means that students have just about 7 days left to finalize projects, write documentation , work out those little bugs... I have to say, on one side I am glad it will soon be over, those who know me know that I have been working on a few projects besides Geeklog and it took a lot of energy out of me, so I welcome the break, just a few days. I say a few days because my classes start soon and I have no intention of leaving the CrowdTranslator as it is now, or as it will be in a few days.

Credentials

The first idea for remote submission was to allow all sites using Geeklog to submit to Geeklog's master page. However when I started working I decided to make it more crowd and web like. Basically in what I have now any site using Geeklog CMS can submit translations to any other site using Geeklog. of course it would be plain stupid to allow just anyone to send data to a database, and given that Geeklog is the secure CMS I have a feeling someone would have shot me if I submitted such code. What I taught was a good solution was to allow admins to give credentials to pages which are allowed to submit. The interface for this is very simple (take a look at the pic). The creation of the account is also very simple but only because I borrowed some magic from Geeklogs user registration.

Basically if you have 2 sites, lets call one Geeklog and the other Loggeek , Geeklog's admin will go to this page and create a username and password for Loggeek and give this username and password to the Loggeek admin. Later on Loggek's admin can send translations to Geeklog via a very similar form which looks like the picture right. In order to send data Loggeek's admin will have to provide the URL to Geeklog, the username and password(credentials) provided.

I have managed to re-use a portion of the local translation submission code for the remote submission - very good thing.

Finally after the translations are submitted the user is provided with a thank you screen. And I threw in a little extra which I intend to work on later on - bragging iframe. At this point the iframe simply states something like:

 We have submitted 19 translations to www.ius-students.com (ius-students.com is a web domain I had laying around so I use it for testing of the plugin). What I intend to have here is a collection of badges just like any user would get. The page generates the code so Loggeek's admin can just copy it and paste it in somewhere in the page.

The rules

I have also set up a set of preliminary rules for submissions which in shot are:

• Only translations with more than 1 positive vote are sent
• Translations which are already sent once will not be sent again
• You need to get credentials from the site you are submitting to

Tweaking the admin index

With adding the new functionality to my plugin I had to add a bit to the admin page. So now the admin page will also display the total number of remotely submitted translations. It will also display the translations and the site names in the translations table.

lib-translator.php

This file was supposed to be the library for the plugin,now it is exactly that. 90% of the plugin code is located there. The reason for this- mainly security, +Dirk Haun  suggested that this way we have less potential attack vectors, the other reason I love how it looks. Although I could not get myself to place all the code there some of it just logically does not belong in there. If however it turns out that it would be majorly better I will do it.

User profile

I also added the personal translations list to the user profile now.

Next step

The next step is writing documentation, it does not like me I don't like it but we ll get along somehow.  Meanwhile Dirk will probably find a bug or two in my code so fixing this is mandatory. After that I will hopefully be able to say that I successfully completed two Google Summer of Code programs, am accepted into a new awesome community and will get my 5 days of blissful ignorance.

Until the next reading,

Cheers

P.S.

For anyone wanting to see a demo of the plugin feel free to make an account on www.ius-students.com and play with it. The admin credentials are as provided by Geeklog.