meteor-messageformat

MessageFormat support, the Meteor way.

For iron:router < 1.0.0, use messageformat v0.0.45.

For Meteor < 0.8.0, use messageformat v0.0.26.

Description

Easy reactive use of complicated strings (gender, plural, etc) with insanely easy translation into other languages (through a web UI).

For full info, docs and examples, see the Meteor MessageFormat home page (or install/clone the smart package and run mrt in its website directory).

Installation

To install, simply run the following command in your project folder:

meteor add gadicohen:messageformat

You will then need to add an initialization setting in your project. E.g. in lib/config.js add the following:

mfPkg.init('en');

Replace 'en' with the native language of your project, if appropriate. You can also pass a second argument with options; for more details see the online docs.

Usage

Once installed, you can start adding the MessageFormat helper to templates:

<p>This string is translatable</p>

...becomes ...

<p>{{mf 'trans_string' 'This string is translatable'}}</p>

Note: Each translation string must have a unique key. In the above example, trans_string is the key.

In short, you'll get to use the {{mf}} helper.

Extracting translation strings

After you have added several translation strings to your templates, you will need to extract those strings for translation. To do so:

sudo npm install -g meteor-messageformat (once)
To update strings, in your project directory, type mf_extract
To see the tralsnation UI, navigate to localhost:3000/translate

Advanced Usage

Much more complex strings are possible, and are useful even if your website is only available in one language, e.g.:

1{{#mf KEY='gender_plural' GENDER=getGender NUM_RESULTS=getNum NUM_CATS=getNum2}}
2{GENDER, select,
3       male {He}
4     female {She}
5      other {They}
6 } found {NUM_RESULTS, plural,
7         =0 {no results}
8        one {1 result}
9      other {# results}
10 } in {NUM_CATS, plural,
11        one {1 category}
12      other {# categories}
13 }.
14 {{/mf}}

Possible outputs:

1He found 2 results in 1 category.
2She found 1 result in 2 categories.
3etc

Besides gender, there is support for offsets too, e.g.:

1You and one other person added this to their profile.