It has been a while since I've posted an update on localize.drupal.org services for various reasons. I greatly hoped that our Google Summer of Code project for activity tracking announced with big fanfare in May goes through well, but unfortunately my student dropped out from the program lacking time due to family reasons and did not make useful progress to roll out improvements.

Also, Dries selected me to lead an effort to dramatically improve language support in Drupal core for Drupal 8 and that has a scope way beyond just software translation. We did a pretty good job of providing tools for software translations so far with localize.drupal.org, l10n_update and l10n_client modules, but for Drupal 8, the focus is to bring complete core features and more usability to these and content and configuration translation alike. It is very exciting and going to bring Drupal to a whole new level where language support is needed! To follow that effort, see the video and mindmap at http://drupal.org/node/1260534. It is a huge undertaking and it required me to dramatically dial down my focus on localize.drupal.org improvements.

However, in the meantime, our misterious problems with some packages being partially parsed did not solve themselves, and we could not figure out the real reasons, so Zoltán Balogh got tired enough of the problem that he coded a workaround for every team manager to be able to request a release to reset itself and parsed again. That was just rolled out, so now every translation community manager should be able to see a Start over link on project release lists, with which you can request for a broken parsed release to be parsed again. Because our release parsing problems are transient, this should get you back a fully parsed release pretty soon afterwards.

There is also continued interest to set up new teams on the site, I've just added Oriya, Lao, Azerbaijani and Tamil (Sri Lanka) to the list of languages, which is now just one shy of a hundred (not counting our test language playground). That is an amazing number! Get ready to pop your champagnes! Who is going to be number 100?

Finally, Dashamir Hoxha did a stellar job to come in fresh to the Drupal community and update such a huge module as the Localization server module to Drupal 7! Yes! It passes all tests (although the test suite does not cover all of the functionality, it does cover all the basics and a sizable part of what localize.drupal.org needs). It would need more work, but we are a lot closer to be able to update localize.drupal.org to Drupal 7 in the future.

Now with all this while there are very nice prospects for localize.drupal.org, I will likely not be able to dedicate a good amount of time to the site, so I decided to post a public call for help instead, while I still have resources to help mentor people who would like to contribute and possibly eventually take over maintenance and improvement of the site. For a long time, localize.drupal.org was the posterchild of great improvements on drupal.org, now that all the awesome improvements are going on on drupal.org we should not leave localize.drupal.org behind either. Are you interested in working on gradual improvements? Porting the site to Drupal 7 (og, messaging and notifications and all that)? Comment and let's see how I can help you help Drupal!

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