Today, Fabien and I both released a plugin we have been working on for a little while.

sfI18nExport

The sfI18nExportPlugin will make your life easier if you work on internationalized applications. Its purpose it to automate the creation and update of dictionaries for the interface translation, and it is compatible with all the dictionary storage strategies implemented in symfony (XLIFF, gettext, Creole, SQLite and MySQL).

On an application already using interface translation (with, between others, the __() helper), you can run the new i18n-extract task with the symfony command line. The plugin will parse all the possible sources of text to translate (templates, actions, libraries, validation files, view configuration, etc.) and register all the sentences of your application. It will then compare the list resulting from this operation with the one from your dictionary, and complement the dictionary if some are missing.

For instance, to create (or update) the French dictionary of a frontend application, you would simply type:

$ php symfony i18n-extract frontend fr --auto-save

The task will use the I18N settings defined in your application, so if your dictionary format if XLIFF, the result of the command will be a new/updated XLIFF dictionary.

If you want to bootstrap a new Spanish translation, you can just call the same command:

$ php symfony i18n-extract frontend es --auto-save

The new task provided by this plugin is integrated into the trunk, so you won't need to install the plugin to use it in the future 1.1 release.

sfBB

Plugins not only provide new development tools, they can bundle a whole application. You already know the sfSimpleBlogPlugin, which adds a blog to your application; today, you can use the sfBBPlugin to add a bulletin board in the same way.

Based on a development by superhaggis, the sfBBPlugin is not a full-featured forum package. You already know that we don't like to reinvent the wheel. There are so many forums developped in PHP that you will surely find a fit if what you need is only a forum. But if you need a simple forum interfaced with other symfony components, that's where the plugin comes of great use.

Designed to be fast and simple, easy to use and customize, the code of this plugin is very modular. sfBBPlugin will work seamlessly with sfGuardPlugin and sfFeed2Plugin, and already supports i18n.

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Do you want more plugins?

As with other plugins, feel free to try them and report any question/remark you would have. For bugs and enhancements, please use the trac system.

To conclude, the plugin list now shows 91 plugins, and more and more of these plugins are standalone components that you can use as bricks to build up an application in minutes. Many thanks to all the contributors, and if you fell like contributing to symfony, please publish a plugin!

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