meteor-messageformat

MessageFormat support, the Meteor way.

Note: This v0 branch is feature frozen. Critical bugs and security issues will still be fixed, but for the most part, all our attention is now on the v2 branch (which at time of writing, has still not been released officially but is being used in production since around March 2015)

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:

1mfPkg.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. See more advanced examples below and particularly the online docs for many more examples and more complete explanations.

Extracting translation strings

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

Once off:

1. sudo npm install -g meteor-messageformat (once)
2. Make sure you've run meteor in your project dir at least once.

To update:

1. In your project directory, type mf_extract (that's an underscore)
2. To see the tralsnation UI, navigate to http:/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.:

{{#mf KEY='gender_plural' GENDER=getGender NUM_RESULTS=getNum NUM_CATS=getNum2}}
{GENDER, select,
       male {He}
     female {She}
      other {They}
 } found {NUM_RESULTS, plural,
         =0 {no results}
        one {1 result}
      other {# results}
 } in {NUM_CATS, plural,
        one {1 category}
      other {# categories}
 }.
 {{/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.

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).