Poedit 2 was released today after two years in development. The app has a refreshed interface for translating .PO files, which Poedit creator Václav Slavík said was created by a professional designer. It is also the first paid upgrade for Pro users since the app added support for WordPress theme and plugin translations in 2013.
Poedit 2 introduces direct connectivity support for WordPress, allowing developers to connect directly to the server instead of working with unpackaged plugins/themes locally.
“Putting translation files on the server was the most common source of problems in Poedit (too many things can go wrong if you’re not yet very familiar with WP) and this feature should help a lot with that,” Slavík said.
This release adds support for Twig templates and Timber. In the past, users had difficulty extracting strings from Twig templates, requiring some fragile workarounds. Slavík said some users resorted to setting up Poedit to treat them as Python files. Poedit 2 has a new built-in extractor for Twig.
Poedit 2 also introduces a new pre-translation feature that allows for batch pre-translation of the entire PO file at once using Poedit’s online database and machine translation. After this has processed, users can then read through and correct any errors. Slavík said this feature saves a lot of time for many WordPress-related translations, such as themes, where a lot of strings are often repeated.
Poedit used to be available from the Mac App Store but is now distributed exclusively from the Poedit.net website. The latest release drops support for older operating systems and requires users to be on Windows 7 or newer, macOS 10.10 Yosemite, or a modern Linux distribution.
I am currently in the process of building a multi-lingual e-commerce site and the last version of Poedit has been such a massive time saver for me. I am looking forward to trying out the new version, I couldn’t recommend this software enough for translating a site.