As Michelle mentioned on her last post, the work of many of you has made it possible to have most of the Firefox OS documentation ready. This has been the work of the whole SUMO community: some have been more involved than others writing or researching articles, others have been welcoming and helping new users. And it is this joint effort that allows us to do great things.

Now we know that we have a strong KB community able to write the documentation of Firefox OS in a collective effort. This is fantastic! This is what we mean, when we talk about being heroic.

We think this is a huge achievement and we would like to celebrate! So please join us next Monday for the SUMO contributor meeting, we will be having party hats, balloons and cake to celebrate this achievement. We want as many of you to join us and celebrate with us! So here’s the information about the meeting: https://etherpad.mozilla.org/sumo-2013-04-22

If you can’t join us, let us know that you’re also happy and celebrating with us :) A message in this thread would be awesome.

Looking forward to seeing you all on Monday!

As you know we are working hard to make the L10n tools at SUMO better, and since we already have some amazing improvements, it’s time to celebrate!
The celebration weekend will be a lot of fun, the idea is to translate, update and review as many articles as possible.  This will help us to be more up to date and also to test the new tools and know how they work. And the best part is that the three most active localizers this weekend will get a super cool lego SUMO warrior!

So join us to celebrate and test the new tools!  As soon as the project is complete we will update you with all the changes we did. But for now check out this amazing selection:

Unreviewed changes? Someone else editing the article? We will warn you!
Woohoo, you will no longer edit an article just to realize afterwards that there were already unreviewed versions, or that someone was just editing it!

You want to keep track of all? Subscribing to email notifications is now piece of cake!
You want to know when an article is waiting for review, is approved or ready for L10n? Just subscribe to the email notifications, now very easy to find on the dashboard.

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New article version, what is it about? Know what changed in the article upfront!
When an article changes the editor will briefly comment what changes they made. This will help you to understand the scope of the translation right away!
And now we also have the history of changes for the keywords and summaries.

New intelligent diff tool!
This time our developer went the extra mile to get us a brand new diff tool! What’s so cool about it?

• Sentences are numbered, making it super easy to find the sentence you’re working on.
• Now you see exactly what changed in a sentence and don’t have to compare the whole sentence but can immediately see what changed!
• You have all information in one place! You no longer need to look at two columns to find out what changed, but have all the changes in the same column. It’s easier to find the information quickly.
• The new diff tool will also show you your edits before you submit them for review, so you’re sure everything is as you wanted!

New text editor with super magic syntax highlighting!
If the new diff tool is amazing, the new text editor is just incredibly awesome! Our amazing contributor Tobbi developed this great feature that will allow us recognize what is wiki markup and what is actual text. This is not only amazing for experienced L10n contributors, but incredibly helpful for new contributors. And the cherry on top are the line number! So Thanks Tobbi for this incredible contribution!

As you see, we have a lot to celebrate, so join us, edit, review, update and translate with us this weekend. Go SUMO warriors!

We gathered  the feedback from our localizers to know what improvements should be done for the L10n tools. We then categorized the user stories according to the priority and the scope of the effort to implement them. Now we hope that these improvements will make our localizer’s life easier!

But before that we want to get your feedback on these changes again, so that we can ensure that they are useful and cover your needs. So please go to this etherpad and see the user stories. If you want to add comments on them, you can do it in their specific etherpads. The bugs will be created soon, so that we can continue the discussions on Bugzilla.

Please let us know your thoughts and give us your feedback!

We have been working on a new Information Architecture (IA) in SUMO, it sounds complicated but it just makes it easier for users to find the articles that they need.

Basically, it allows users to browse SUMO and narrow down the list of articles in a way that makes them confident they are choosing right article and if they don’t, it makes it easy for them to trace their steps back. The result is that user find the right article faster.

This new IA will come with a general SUMO redesign. Some things are just cosmetic changes, other things are changes to the way SUMO works. If you are curious about the changes, look at this screenshot that shows how the new SUMO home page will look like.

As a localizer you will be able to customize the News section of this home page, so that you can have the relevant information for your locale on the front page.

As you start browsing the site, the new intelligent IA will suggest the most relevant articles. If you wish to know more details about this, let me know and I can explain how the IA works its magic.

The most important change for you localizers is that you have less work, since you won’t need to localize the navigation articles for the desktop navigation pages anymore. They will be automatically generated by the smart IA. The (IA) pages will look like this Indonesian example.

As you can see in the previous mock-up, users will see the localized articles more relevant to their issue first. At the bottom of the page we will show articles in English that are also relevant to the topic selected but haven’t been translated yet. We think that giving the users who speak English in your locale the chance of seeing other useful articles is a further way of helping them.

We are considering two changes to the new “IA pages” and it would be great to get your opinion on these:

- making the “barrier” between the localized articles and the English articles more prominent, so that users aren’t confused if they see English content.

- having a message before the English articles along the lines of: “These articles haven’t been translated, you can help us do it, sign up”, so that we can recruit new localizers. We know how much work it is and we would like to help you find new contributors.

What you need to take into account is that we have several new strings on verbatim. Many of you have already translated them, so thanks for that!

Again, please let me know if you have any questions about this. The changes are planned to go live end of next week and we hope to be able to help more users faster thanks to these changes.

Please help us spread the word among localizers and send this to everyone in your locale, retweet and re-post :D

Let us know your thoughts on this: visit our forum, where this is also posted and we can keep all discussions in one place.

We have good news for our SUMO localizers: we will have some development time to enhance the SUMO l10n tools! We know that our tools were designed for the past release cycle, and now that we have a new Firefox version every 6 weeks we have many updates. I have talked to many of you and we know that we could do some things better. So please, give us your feedback and we will make the tools better for you.

Right now we have so many articles that need an update, so as you do this work, you can think about the main pain points and give us your ideas to make this better. We would love to implement all of your ideas and solve all of your problems, but we don’t have the resources to do it. So please keep in mind that we will have to choose a couple of changes and that we can’t promise you to fix all. But I’m sure we will find a way to make the tools much better!

We want to make this a collective effort, so we created the project plan and  three etherpads to track the bugs that were already created, the main pain points and your ideas. It would be great if all of you give us your input or just put your name and a +1 next to an idea or comment you support. If you would like to have a conversation about tools with me or with other localizers we can organize a video, phone or IRC meeting let me know, I’d be more than happy to host it. The idea is to work on this together and create tools that work well for you, our localizers.

You can find the project plan here: http://mzl.la/OCMFdh. Please circle this with all SUMO localizers and give us as much feedback as you can. If you have comments on the project plan or any questions I’m here to help.

SUMO has been redoing a lot of things to make it easier for users to find the right article. We are changing the navigation of our pages (the English website looks completely different now) and we also updated our article titles and summaries. Sounds like a lot of work for our localizers, right?

The good news is that we are sure that by doing these changes users will find help faster, getting to that article you translated with so much less effort. And it will bring happier users, so that you can be sure that your hard work is having a bigger impact. These changes are voluntary, so if you don’t have the time right away you can wait, but we strongly recommend them, for you and the users.

If you want to get the bigger picture don’t miss Michael’s post, he has all the detailed information. Also don’t hesitate to ask him or me about the new navigation or the new articles titles and summaries. We know it’s a lot of work, but we can do it as a team! Again, if you need any help or support, if you are frustrated or happy, or just want to chat, drop me a line. I’m here for you.

Big thanks to all of you for making Firefox easy to use for users all around the world. We are bringing the open web everywhere because of you!

Firefox 13 has been released and this new version has a lot of amazing new features like the new tab experience. So we need to be ready to help our users with this new version, and that means lots of updates to our knowledge base. At the very same time we were working on the articles for the Firefox mobile native UI release. Hence we added a ton of articles; there were about 70 of them! But our localizers did a great job and managed this incredible amount of work, pushing SUMO to the usual localization coverage.

This means a lot for a lot of users worldwide who can use Firefox and get all the goodies in their language. So a big thank you to all our localizers for all your efforts. Your work is a fundamental part of bringing the open web to people all around the world.

Kudos SUMO localizers!

Our long time contributor Tobbi (Tobias Markus) just made the support forums better. He implemented an autocomplete feature that makes it easier for contributors to search for articles while answering questions. When you want to link to a KB article, you can browse the link input field and don’t have to open another tab. You can also use “#”to point to specific sections of the article. This feature makes answering questions easier and will save our contributors time.

The story of this feature started when Propeng and Tobbi began brainstorming about how to improve the old tiki-wiki based site and came up with the idea. Tobbi built an add-on with the autocomplete functionality and since it was awesome we suggested him to try to make it a built-in feature in our kitsune code. It seemed like a big step for Tobbi, but he took the challenge and now every contributor can use his feature.

We are really proud that our community is actively involved in coding SUMO and making it better, and we want to encourage other contributors interested in coding to join us. Tobbi worked with our SUMO coding steward Ricky Rosario, who guided him through our coding conventions.

Tobbi is already thinking bout his next big project: the canned answers, so stay tunned. If you want to join our coding community and get help from Ricky don’t hesitate to contact him or me. We are looking forward to more great contributions from our community.

And once again: kudos Tobbi!