GlotPress has been alive and kicking for a couple of months now. There has been positive feedback and there has been not-so-positive feedback. But there have been tons of feedback. Translators have been using inferior tools for years and already have a long list of features they want in a translation editor. This led to the logical question: which feature do we implement next?

One thing I’ve learned from WordPress development is that implementing every feature users want rarely makes all users happier. Often those who requested it, don’t use it either. We should include only functionality that is useful for 99% of our users. With this smart advice in mind, I started sorting out through the hundreds of suggestions I had collected during last couple of months. But I encountered a little problem.

Most of the features in the list would be useful to 99% of the users. A collaborative translation editor, which makes translators’ life easy, wasn’t as simple as I wanted. The question again was: which features do we implement now and which do we implement later?

On the dev-day just after WordCamp San Francisco in May, we had a brainstorm session for features and their priority. You can see the result in the Active Tickets by Milestone report in trac. Roughly when we are done with tickets in the 1.0 milestone will be the time to release 1.0. In each milestone tickets are sorted by priority — these on top will be implemented first.

Implementation is the hardest part, even though above I complained how sorting out features and priority was hard. If you feel like coding, grab a feature and drop a line in the mailing list. We’ll be more than happy to help with any advice, testing and debugging.