Announcements

A week ago we wrote about sponsoring support for niche development and now we’re getting ready start with the first multilingual e-commerce solution for WordPress.
Three folks – Nicolas Harnois (2 Associés), Dan Milward (WordPress e-Commerce Plugin) and Level Level have agreed to sponsor this work.
Since we have an interested co-sponsor, we’ll naturally be starting with [...]

WPML 1.7.0 is now ready for your testing. It includes a whole new set of features intended to make building multilingual WordPress sites a whole lot easier.
Automatically turns WordPress themes into multilingual
We’ve already introduced this new feature, but it’s worth explaining again.
As of this version, creating a multilingual theme requires no additional effort on your [...]

We’re adding an option to set WPML’s language switcher design from within the admin screen. This will include setting all the colors of all elements, so that the language switcher matches the site.
In addition to letting users manually enter their own language switcher colors, we’re going to include several preset color schemes to choose from. [...]

We’re getting ready for WPML 1.4.0 and have a preview release for it – wpml_140_prev2.zip
The main change is this release is having two modes:

Basic – allowing only to enter multilingual contents.
Advanced – allowing everything else too.

Before the final release, we’re also going to make the professional translation interface much simpler.
Bugs fixed since 1.3.5
A lot of [...]

We’re just out with a first release of BuddyPress Multilingual. This plugin enables running multilingual BuddyPress sites with WPML.
It adds a language switcher to BuddyPress bar, allowing visitors to select their languages. Then, it hooks to different elements that BuddyPress generates and makes sure they are all language sensitive.
The main blog and guest blogs can [...]

Ever since the beginning, WPML performed way too many database accesses. If your site was on a busy shared host, you might have noticed a serious drop in performance with WPML. Version 1.3.3 fixes this, by eliminating 90% of these queries.
You can grab the first beta release and try it. We’re already using it on [...]

Many folks have asked us how WPML’s language information is stored. Some have even spent valuable time reverse engineering it in order to solve immediate problems (like migrating from Gengo to WPML).
Without further delay, have a look at WPML’s tables description. That page describes the languages and translation table, the country flags table and the [...]

Remember we kept promising we’re going to add new languages to WPML? Well, today’s the day.
If your language isn’t listed you can help us add it. WPML needs to have the rest of the language names translated to your language, then, we can add it. So, this is what you’ll need to do:

Download WPML_language_names.txt.
Translate it [...]

We want to add a fancy showcase section to wpml.org, which will feature sites that use WPML.
This new section will list sites that were added to our forum’s showcase section. It will look like the showcase section on WordPress.org with preview images, description, visitor rating and (of course) outgoing links.
This project involves theme programming and [...]

WPML 1.1 allows translating not just posts, pages, tags and categories but also all the little persistent texts that didn’t get translated so far. These include the blog’s title, tagline, widget titles, widget contents and other ‘floating’ texts.
New in features WPML 1.1

Translation for ‘general settings’ strings: we already talked a bit about translating texts by [...]

We’ve just release what we hope would be the last bug-fix release before the next major version (1.1). WPML 1.0.4 adds some new functions and fixes some persistent problems which managed to slip all the way to this version.
New features

Much faster display for admin pages. This would only be noticed for large sites that have [...]

This is going to be a particularly technical and boring post, so don’t build too high expectations…
We’ve just released WPML 1.0.2. This version doesn’t bring any new features, but it does provide important updates to existing sites and to new sites using WPML. What we’ve done is make the translation database resilient to errors. As [...]

Bug fixes in version 1.0.1
Last week we came out with WPML 1.0.0, which includes the new translation interface. This release fixes problems in that part of the plugin.
Two problems were fixed:

There were missing tables for people updating from version 0.9.9 (fresh installs were OK).
All Asian languages and Norwegian were not set up correctly.

Everyone who is [...]

Today we released WPML 1.0.0 – the first solid release of WPML, which also includes a streamlined interface for content translation.
Fixes and improvements
As in previous versions, we owe a huge thanks to all of you who reported problems in the forum. We’re happy to see that the number of problems is constantly dropping as we’re [...]

We’ve started a new forum category called Introduce yourself and your site. Everyone is welcome to post and introduce sites that use WPML.
What can you get out of it?
We’ll go over each and every site submitted to that category, looking for technical issues and suggesting ways to improve. Running a multilingual site is a [...]