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How to change Loco project settings

If you have permission to modify a project, you can access these settings from the :cog icon: that appears next to the project name in your main dashboard. The window that opens contains two tabs with the following options

Basic info

These basic properties are mainly just for display purposes.

  • Short name
    This is the "slug" that appears in your project dashboard URLs. It's best to leave this if any of your fellow team members have bookmarked project links. Leaving this empty will cause it to be re-generated from the full (friendly) project name.

  • Friendly name
    This is the full name of your project. It's really just a label and you can change it any time without altering the short name if need be.

  • Description
    This is optional information about the project for displaying in your main dashboard listing. It serves no other purpose than to tell your team members what the project is for.

  • Web address
    Entering a web address is optional. If you're a developer, note that this option affects our API referrer checks.

Locale settings

  • Source locale
    This is the native language that you'll be translating from. You can change this to any other locale in your project, but be aware that switching source mid-project can cause confusion, especially if you switch it to a locale with untranslated strings.

    If you just want to modify the source locale's properties (e.g. to change "en-GB" to "en") you can do that elsewhere - see modifying locales.

When source text changes:

These options control what happens when you modify the default language text of an asset.

  • Flag translations as fuzzy
    With this option enabled translations will be marked fuzzy if the source language is changed. This flag indicates that the translations may no longer be accurate and should be reviewed. The flag is automatically cleared the next time a fuzzy translation is saved.

Developer options

These are more advanced configuration options that change the way your project behaves.

Asset IDs

Asset IDs are enabled by default, but you may wish to disable them if your platform uses source text as a unique key. Disabling this option makes it simpler to work with Loco when IDs are not required, for example when working with Gettext.

The options to customize ID auto-formatting are applied when Loco automatically generates an Asset ID from source text. This formatting does not affect ID values you've specifically set yourself.

  • Preferred case:
    The text "Café" would produce "Cafe", "cafe" or "CAFE" depending on whether you prefer to keep the original letter case or convert the ID to lower or upper case.

  • Length:
    IDs will be truncated to this maximum length before being suffixed to maintain uniqueness. For example the strings "Hello World" and "Hell on Earth" would produce "Hell" and "Hell-2" if you entered a maximum length of 4 characters. It's recommended to keep this value large enough to identify your strings uniquely, but no larger than necessary.

  • Separator:
    The single character you enter here defines the 'separator' which replaces all non-alphanumeric characters. The default is a hyphen, such that "foo bar" would produce "foo-bar".

  • Allow punctuation:
    This field permits non-alphanumeric punctuation characters in addition to the separator character. For example: the text "You have %s messages!" would produce "You-have-s-messages" unless you allow the percent symbol, in which case it would produce "You-have-%s-messages".

Note that auto-generated IDs will always be reduced to a single line of ASCII characters. If you need multi-byte characters in your Asset IDs, you should maintain your own custom IDs and avoid automatic ID generation completely.

Asset aliases

Here you can define custom identifiers in addition to the primary asset ID. The aliases you define here are available as custom properties of all new and existing assets in your project. For more detailed information on this feature, please see the developer documentation.

Validation

Formatting errors are shown in the editor by default, but translations are not flagged automatically when they fail validation.

Here you can enable auto-flagging, by selecting a flag from the dropdown list. Every time a translation is saved, it will be checked for errors and flagged if any are found. Existing flags against a translation will take precedence, unless they are also an automatically applied flag.

Legacy options

In order to improve Loco we sometimes have to change default behaviours and retire old features. Old behaviours will be transitioned to configurable options whenever possible to avoid breaking projects that use them.

  • Use old style locale codes
    All new Loco projects use standard language tags, but if you have an old project or just prefer the legacy style, you can change it here. This option was added to ease migration from the old to the new style when it was introduced in November 2015.

  • Use "name" alias for source text previews
    If you have this option, it's because your project uses deprecated asset name fields. Please read the announcement.