We setup a WordPress.com account on Twitter.  Check it out for some behind-the-scenes updates and backchannel chatter.

Thanks to the efforts of the WordPress i18n community, we have a fairly complete translation of wordpress.com in Turkish. Check out the admin in Turkish. We’re always excited to see wordpress.com in other languages, so keep those translations coming in.

We have enabled three translations here at wordpress.com — de, es, and pt. If you use one of those languages on your blog, send feedback on any problems you notice. Since we here behind the scenes don’t speak every language there is, we need help from you to correct incorrect translations. If you don’t like how something is translated, visit translate.wordpress.com to propose a new translation. Here’s how:

• Visit translate.wordpress.com
• Login using your wordpress.com username and password
• Select your preferred language from the dropdown list and click “Set language”
• Click on “All Items” to see a list of the original English strings and their translations
• Using your browser’s search facility, search for the string you want to correct. (I’ll add a built-in search sometime soon.)
• Once you find the string, click the “Edit” link for that string
• Review the translation history of the string. To add a new translation, click “Add a new translation”
• Type in a new translation and click “Add Translation”
• To make your new translation the active translation, click “Approve”
• You’re done

Your translation will take affect the next time I update the language catalogs. I’m doing the update manually during the testing period, so you might have to wait a little while to see the new translation on your blog. When translating strings, make sure you are using the correct locale. If you are translating Brazilian Portugese, select Português do Brasil rather than Português. Also, please note that not all themes are i18n ready. Making all themes translatable will take a little longer, but we’ll get there. Until then, you will still see English strings with some themes.

Saints and sinners all agree
Spanish is a lovin’ tongue
But she never spoke Spanish to me

The translation work at wordpress.com is going well. I present to you the wordpress.com Dashboard in Spanish (mostly).

In addition to the option that sets the language to use for the front page of your blog, each user will be able to choose the language they want to use for the admin interface. If your blog is Spanish but you want to use English in the admin interface, you can do that. Each user gets to choose the language they want to see in the admin.

This isn’t yet live on wordpress.com but should be soon. If you use wordpress.com and want to help with translation, head over to translate.wordpress.com and translate a few strings. This will help other wordpress.com users as well as the WordPress and bbPress communities in general.

Update: Spanish is now active. Not all themes have been translated, but the admin area has good coverage.  If you don’t want your admin to display in Spanish, visit your profile and change the Interface Language (Idioma de la interface).

TinyMCE 2.0.5, including the new spell checker, is in WP trunk. We auditioned this on WordPress.com for awhile and received lots of positive feedback. Over the history of WordPress, the number one most requested feature is WYSIWYG editing. We added that in 2.0 when we incorporated TinyMCE. With that down, the number one request became spell checking. A spell checker is a make or break feature for many people. So, here it is.

(This post not spell checked because I am a hard core. I dare you to find a single mispeling on this page.)

Thanks to Michael Adams AJAX is featured in more places in the WordPress admin. We use AJAX primarily to avoid page reloads when manipulating lists. When deleting posts, pages, categories, comments, or bookmarks, you will see the deleted object fade out of the list and vanish. No reload required. We do this in a few places in 2.0.x, but now we do it more comprehensively. See this tracking ticket for details. This change will be available in the next release of WordPress. Right now you can get it only by pulling the latest development bits out of the subversion repository.

And, yes, the admin pages degrade nicely when using less capable browsers. I can still administer my blog using my BlackBerry.

Owen and Robert have put together a nice cron implementation for WP.  Internally, this is used to schedule future posts.  It is also available to plugin authors who want to be able to schedule events.  Check out the in-progress API.

WP contributor “random” spotted a couple places where some small bits of code were causing slow downs disproportionate to their size. random provided patches for ent2ncr and smilies that resulted in a nice performance bump. Small code cleanups like this can have big results.

We have two new importers in the svn tree: Live Journal and dotclear. These will be in 2.0.1.

We’re fixing bugs in preparation for a 2.0.1 maintenance release. Watch the roadmap for bugfix activity. If you want to make sure your “favorite” 2.0 bug is fixed, join the testers list and download a nightly build.