Sunday, May 29, 2016

Title Translator | Alchemy Plugin for Tridion

I worked on a Tridion implementation for a client managing huge local content for their websites. One could imagine that local content is hardly anything to do with a developer, but he could be wrong. So at that client, with the content inside the localized components, the title of the items were also in local languages (at many places), specifically they had tons of local taxonomies with the local language titles. Now if any issues reported for a localized website, it was a nightmare for the developers to dig in to the content while investigating that issue because we developers knew only English language.

Few weeks ago, while looking at some of old work for that client that I remembered those days and that issue. So I decided to create a Alchemy Plugin called called Title Translator to address that issue, you can follow the link to Alchemy Web Store and download it from there.
This is really a simple plugin which uses SDL Translation API in background, all you need to do is get a SDL Translation API key, set the key in Plugin Configuration and you are ready to go. In the coming versions, I will try to include the support for Microsoft and Google translation as well.

To use the plugin, simply right click on a title in your CMS Filtered Item list or left-hand​ navigation panel and select 'Translate Title'. The updated title will show in the notification bar.












On the Technical side, This plugin is created using Alchemy Framework. The idea was pretty simple, create a context menu extension and on clicking it fire a command to show the translated title in notification bar.

The Code for the Plugin can be found here on Github. This basically have following building blocks:

  • TranslatorContextMenuExtension: This class holds information about your context menu extension. Other than specifying name and id, below are the important pieces of info it has:  
    • The order of your extension in the context menu.
    • Associated command to the context menu extension.
    • Dependent resource groups.
    • Which view, the extension applies to, In this extesnsion it applies to "DashboardView".
  • TranslatorCommandSet: The class is all about creating a command set from the commands specified in the JS files. We have only one command called "translate" and it is add to the commandset.
  • TranslatorResourceGroup: This class is used to tell alchemy, which resources (files/CommandSets) are you using in your extension. We have just one JS file named "TranslatorCommand.js" and one command set, so adding those in there.
  • TranslatorCommand.js file: This file holds the command code, which fires once "Translate Title" in context menu is clicked. The code basically sends the request to the SDL Machine Translation Service and gets back the translated title as an response and shows it in notification bar.
That's it chaps, go use it. And yeah, feel free to leave comments, questions, report bugs, improvements, pretty much anything related to it.


Thanks.

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