Slightly over ten years ago the Language team released the first MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle, or MLEB for short. To date, we have made 64 releases supporting MediaWiki versions from 1.19 to 1.40alpha, and PHP versions from 5.2 to 8.
Some things are still the same: * MediaWiki version compatibility policy * tarball releases * the goal of providing top notch language support in a convenient package
Some things have changed: * we went from monthly releases to quarterly releases * LocalizationUpdate is no longer included in the bundle because it was made obsolete by automatic translation backports
We don't know much about the users of the MLEB, but according to our statistics, each tarball release is downloaded on average approximately 300 times. Some people use MLEB releases via git.
As the initiator of MLEB, I am happy to see how far we have come. Thanks belong to Abijeet Patro and Kartik Mistry who together have done the actual work to make the releases in the past years.
Fun fact: the tool used to make MLEB releases is called melange. I don't remember for sure, but I think the name was chosen because it's short for "MEdiawiki LANGuagE'' and it had a quite appropriate meaning: "A mixture of different things; a disordered mixture" (English Wiktionary).
The first release announcement is quoted below.
-Niklas
ke 28. marrask. 2012 klo 12.17 Niklas Laxström (niklas.laxstrom@gmail.com) kirjoitti:
The Wikimedia Language Engineering team is pleased to announce the first release of the MediaWiki Language Extension Bundle. The bundle is a collection of selected MediaWiki extensions needed by any wiki which desires to be multilingual.
This first bundle release (2012.11) is compatible with MediaWiki 1.19, 1.20 and 1.21alpha. Get it from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MLEB
The Universal Language Selector is a must have, because it provides an essential functionality for any user regardless on the number of languages he/she speaks: language selection, font support for displaying scripts badly supported by operating systems and input methods for typing languages that don't use Latin (a-z) alphabet.
Maintaining multilingual content in a wiki is a mess without the Translate extension, which is used by Wikimedia, KDE and translatewiki.net, where hundreds of pieces of documentation and interface translations are updated every day; with Localisation Update your users will always have the latest translations freshly out of the oven. The Clean Changes extension keeps your recent changes page uncluttered from translation activity and other distractions.
Don't miss the chance to practice your rusty language skills and use the Babel extension to mark the languages you speak and to find other speakers of the same language in your wiki. And finally the cldr extension is a database of language and country translations.
We are aiming to make new releases every month, so that you can easily stay on the cutting edge with the constantly improving language support. The bundle comes with clear installation and upgrade installations. The bundle is tested against MediaWiki release versions, so you can avoid most of the temporary breaks that would happen if you were using the latest development versions instead.
Because this is our first release, there can be some rough edges. Please provide us a lot of feedback so that we can improve for the next release.
-Niklas
-- Niklas Laxström