In that time, however, I was also contacted by Marcis G. who provided me with a Belarusian/Беларускі localization, and later by easespot with a Chinese (Simplified)/中文 localization (and before I had a chance to release it FunDo provided a second Chinese (Simplified) localization).

Once all of the localizations were in and up to date I had to do some tweaking, plus my curiosity had been piqued by the number of localizations I was getting in, and I wanted to do something that would help me track just how many people are using WP-Slimbox2 in a language other than English, so I threw together a little tracking script, statTrack.php that would transmit that information to me upon activation of the plugin. The only information that’s transmitted is the locale, and it’s only ever done once. Since I know some people are a bit touchy about anything that “phones home” I implemented it in such a way that it can easily be deactivated by deleting the statTrack.php file, without effecting the functionality of the plugin.

Now, just as I was about to wrap all of that up, Christophe Beyls, the creator of Slimbox, posted a comment on the last release letting me know that he’d just released version 2.0.4 of Slimbox, so of course I had to tack that on to the list of things to implement! The main thing he’d implemented that would effect the WordPress community was increased support for RTL languages, though I still don’t have any RTL localizations. He also fixed a few issues with jQuery 1.4 and Flash (currently WordPress only uses 1.3.2, but some users may implement 1.4, and eventually WordPress will likely upgrade. He also trimmed the script down a bit by removing some compatibility code, which was no longer needed after he switched the jQuery requirement to 1.3.

Ok, so I finally got all of that taken care of, but there was still one more thing to do! My brother and I have been hoping to start marketing some custom art type projects, and he’d finally gotten around to getting some of them off the ground, so we’ve added a store! Currently we’re just selling some silk-screen shirt designs, but it’s still cool. Check it out and support Transient Monkey!

Major changes on the user side include the addition of the wonderful jQuery Farbtastic colorpicker Javascript, created by Steven Wittens and a new key code detection script (written by me) that allows you to simply type the keys you’d like to use instead of looking up their key code.

Major changes on the backend include a rewrite of the core to utilize the WPlize class to clean up the code and minimize database calls by utilizing a single database entry and utilizing an array to store all the variables.

Major changes for people who don’t speak English, or would just prefer to use their native tongue, we’ve added Dutch/Nederlandse and French/Français to the list of supported languages. Thank you nv1962 and Jandry for your efforts, and to all the translators for bringing their translations up to speed.

That means WP-Slimbox2 is now available in Dutch/Nederlandse, English (of course), French/Français, German/Deutsch, and Spanish/Español.

Hopefully the list of supported languages will continue to grow. If you’d like to contribute a translation, or have suggestions please post a comment and check out the support forums.