Pontoon

Pontoon is a live website localization tool. Instead of extracting original strings and then merging translated strings back, Pontoon can turn any website into editable mode using the contentEditable attribute.

This enables localizers to translate websites in-place with context and spatial limitations right in front of them. A full list of extracted strings is also available, to help with strings that are hard to reach, e.g. error messages and the <title> tag.

To enable localization of your site with Pontoon, simply include the script located at /static/pontoon.js to overcome cross frame scripting, and Pontoon will autodetect strings. Or, to make the best out of Pontoon, fully prepare your site with hooks that will mark strings for localization and include all the neccessary tags.

Installation

Pontoon uses Playdoh, which supports running web apps in virtual machines. This is an ideal way to get started developing Pontoon quickly without dealing with dependancies, compiling things and polluting your development system.

1. Install VirtualBox by Oracle to run our VM.
2. Install Vagrant to easily customize and access our VM:

• gem install vagrant (requires Ruby and gem, but most modern *NIX systems already have them)

3. Clone Pontoon or your fork:

• git clone --recursive git://github.com/mathjazz/pontoon.git

4. Run a virtual development environment from your working copy directory:

• cd pontoon
• vagrant up

5. Install dependencies:

• vagrant ssh
• sudo apt-get install python-svn mercurial

If you’re running it for the first time, vagrant up will take a few minutes to download base VM image, boot Ubuntu VM, install all the necessary packages and run initialization scripts.

Usage

You can edit files in your working copy directory (/pontoon) locally and they will automatically show up under /home/vagrant/pontoon in the VM without any weird FTPing.

1. In not running yet, start the VM from your working copy directory:

• vagrant up

2. Enter VM:

• vagrant ssh

3. Run the development web server (in VM):

• cd pontoon
• python manage.py runserver 0.0.0.0:8000

4. Point your web browser to http://localhost:8000.

Note that you’ll need to explicitly set the host and port for runserver to be accessible from outside the VM. Vagrant setup already forwards port 8000 (the usual Django development port).

Local settings

Django local settings file should be stored at /pontoon/settings/local.py. Copy contents from /pontoon/settings/local.py-dist.

• SITE_URL: required for BrowserID, set if different from http://127.0.0.1:8000.
• HMAC_KEYS: set or uncomment if you need bcrypt, e.g. when running ./manage.py createsuperuser.
• SESSION_COOKIE_SECURE = False: uncomment if running a local development install without HTTPS to disable HTTPS-only cookies.
• MICROSOFT_TRANSLATOR_API_KEY: set to a valid Microsoft Translator API key to use machine translation.
• GOOGLE_ANALYTICS_KEY: set to a valid Google Analytics key to use Google Analytics.

Hooks

To use PHP hooks:

• Link /hooks/ to your web server's document root.
• Store Pontoon application path in the $path variable in /hooks/php/local-settings.php if different from http://localhost:8000.

To extract strings, run:

• xgettext -L PHP --keyword=_w --from-code=UTF-8 --output=messages.pot *.php

Updates

To sync your repository with upstream changes, just update the code using git:

git pull && git submodule sync --quiet && git submodule update --init --recursive

To only update Playdoh and submodules, do:

git pull playdoh master && git submodule foreach git pull origin master

Get involved

• File an issue
• Read more on the Wiki
• Join #pontoon on IRC
• Follow us on Twitter

License

This software is licensed under the New BSD License. For more information, read the file LICENSE.