Just a quick recap. WPML includes these modules:

• Core (which everyone uses)
• String Translation
• Translation Management
• Sticky Links
• XLIFF
• Media Translation
• Multiple e-commerce glues
• CMS Navigation

I’m pretty sure that not everyone needs everything, but can you say that there isn’t something here that could make your life much easier and you’re just not aware of?

We’re going to launch a training series soon, which will include short lessons about how to do stuff. We’ll talk about how to best translate different parts of your site (content, theme, plugins and widgets), how to better manage translation, how to optimize for speed and search engines (SEO) and more.

This training will come in the form of short emails. You’ll be able to control what you receive (if any). True, it’s all spread across wpml.org, but it takes digging to get to everything. We think that by compiling it into individual lessons, we can make this a lot more fun than browsing our site looking for hidden gems.

Would you like to tell us what actually bothers and interests you? Leave comments here, so that everyone can see what people want.

The Spanish support is provided by our native Spanish-speaking staff. When you need help, you can ask for it in English, or in Spanish and you’ll get the same great level of support you’re used to receive from WPML (which we’re constantly pushing up).

This is a pilot program. So far, we’re happy with how it’s going and we’re thinking about expanding it to other languages. Next in our todo list is Japanese.

Feedback and ideas are always welcome!

The plugin is available right now from the WordPress repository:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/qtranslate-to-wpml-export/

It’s a two-trick pony.

In its cleanup mode, it will remove all those qTranslate language meta tags from your content. If you’ve ever experimented with qTranslate, you might have noticed that the site’s content becomes irreversibly corrupt with language meta tags (without qTranslate, these are HTML comments).

You can use the qTranslate Importer to just cleanup the database. Activate it and use without WPML and you’ll get to the cleanup mode.

The WPML import mode will convert the content from qTranslate to WPML. It processes pages, posts, tags, categories, custom fields and all custom posts and taxonomy types. Instead of having different languages mixed in the database, each language will go to its own separate location (post, taxonomy or meta).

The plugin also adjusts all internal and incoming links to the new URLs, fixes the page hierarchy and more.

When you’re trying this conversion, please keep some basics in mind:

• Don’t run this on live sites. Download a development version of the site and work on this locally.
• Go over the results and review them. You’ll most likely find some things that the conversion script didn’t manage to handle. Check your content and the WordPress setting screens.
• Learn how to use WPML’s String Translation. You’ll most certainly need this to translate non-post items.

To get started, review the qTranslate to WPML importer guide.

We’re eager to hear how this is working for you. Let us know!

To translate your gallery, make sure that the String Translation module is enabled.

Translating strings in NextGen Gallery

All the gallery strings are under context ‘plugin_ngg‘. Don’t confuse this with the ‘plugin nextgen-gallery’ strings. The later ones are for translation of strings in NGG’s PHP, not in your galleries.

The string names will tell you what you’re translating. For example, gal_2_title is the title of gallery 2. pic_6_alttext is the ALT tag for picture 6. You probably get the idea…

The image and gallery texts will show according to the language of the page it’s been inserted to. You can insert the same gallery to pages in different languages and you’ll see different texts. The images remain the same.

We put together a small working example here:

http://subsite1.wpml.org/fr/french-album/

You can play with it and see how the gallery texts update when you change language.

What next?

We think that this round covers everything. The author of NGG is waiting for our OK to include these changes in NGG code.

Please help us test. When you tell us that it’s OK for you, we’ll pass the update on to NGG author and it will become part of the code for good.

WPML became a commercial product in 2011. While last year, we focused on adding new features, our goal for this year is broader. We’re seeing major trends in the WordPress landscape, and intend for WPML to play a key role in them.

WordPress Trends in 2012

While WordPress became the dominant CMS in 2010 / 2011, we think that 2012 will see WordPress maturing as web-application. We’re already seeing a lot more focus on e-commerce, listing and review sites and other complete applications.

There are already new and exciting e-commerce plugins, joining the older and more well-known ones. It’s been great for everyone. As JigShop, WooCommerce and MarketPress came out, WP E-Commerce developers had to step up and revamp their code. No matter which e-commerce plugin you’re using today, you’re getting a much better product than you did a year ago.

Besides e-commerce, plugins that help customize WordPress have gotten extremely popular. Almost any WordPress site today uses something for custom fields and custom post types management. This means that we’re all using WordPress far beyond pages and posts.

There’s also a wide selection of great themes, that help build complex sites without any coding. Just drag the elements you want, where you want them, and you’re good to go.

Our part is to provide you with a seamless integration experience, allowing you to create complex multilingual WordPress sites, with all these great features.

Mobile Everywhere

Mobile web and touch screens are no longer somewhere over the horizon. They’re here now and they’re here to stay. If my 8 year-old knows how to operate a tablet – I can say for sure that that’s a winner.

We need to make sure that everything that runs well on a PC, also looks great on a tablet. For WPML, it means making it easy for admin and visitors to choose their language.

Never Forget the Basics

Trends are great, but we must never neglect our basics. These are the features that got WordPress and WPML to become so popular. To stay ahead, we need to always keep these basics in mind and in the code:

• Stability – it needs to work without bugs or glitches
• Security – it must be bullet-proof secure
• Compatibility – it needs to work with other plugins and themes
• Performance – it must run lightening fast and stay lean
• Ease-of-use – it must be intuitive, even without having to read Help documents

Stability, security and compatibility have been our main focus in 2011. We’re looking to boost performance even more in the next major release of WPML.

Our own sites run pretty fast because they’re already optimized. If you build a theme from scratch, you can guarantee its performance. We see most performance issues with complex themes that were not exactly designed to work with WPML. In the near future, I’ll write more and explain about how to check if your site’s performance is great and if there are things to improve. Then, we’ll be happy to receive test cases from you, showing where there are bottlenecks.

Also, we recognize the fact that as we added more and more features to WPML, its interface might have gotten a bit complex. We’ll be doing a major round of usability improvements and we’ll be happy to get feedback about it.

Our Goals for 2012

Full Compatibility with all Major E-Commerce Plugins

I know that we’ve been through this before and not always with the best results, but we feel that things are going much better now.

We’ve already got good compatibility with MarketPress and WooCommerce. JigShop is coming next and should be available in the next plugin release.

We finally managed to nail down the major issues with WP E-Commerce. With a bit of help from you guys, I hope that we can push our suggestions into WPEC code and be finally able to announce that it’s working great together.

Allow Building Complex Multilingual Sites

It took us six months, and now, we’re ready with Types and Views (still in Beta, but looking great). These two plugins are our solution for running complex WordPress sites, which are fully WPML compatible.

The upcoming Types and Views versions will allow to build things, never before seen with WordPress. We’re taking powerful features from web-development platforms, such as Ruby-on-Rails and implementing them inside Types and Views. We’ll try to give all that power, but without a fraction of the complexity. Yes, it’s a challenge.

This will allow building complex sites that have interconnected content types, inline lists of related data and other goodies. I’ll write more about that, as we approach the finish line.

For multilingual sites, the challenge is to make everything easily translatable. Since we’re using WPML, Types and Views for our own sites, we’ll make sure that this happens.

Run Faster

We want to see multilingual sites run faster, without having to spend days optimizing database queries. This means that WPML will pre-load and cache results and avoid hitting the database for content that it already loaded once. This is easier said than done. With different themes using the database very differently, we’ve got a lot of analysis and design work, before we can get down to coding.

Be Simpler

Simple can mean many things. Just having a minimalistic GUI doesn’t always mean it’s easy to quickly find what you’re looking to do. We want to make the entire user-experience around WPML better. This includes the site administration, content entry for writers and editors and translation process for translators.

We’re pretty used to how things are, so we’ve kinda developed a blind spot to usability issues. Suggestions are welcome

See You There!

We’re very happy about how 2011 ended and we want to make sure that 2012 turns out even better. A lot of the new development in WPML was due to your feedback. Keep working with us to make WordPress, WPML and your projects the best they can be.

If you have ideas or suggestions, leave comments here. For technical help, check out our technical forum.

If you live in Japan or China and want to work with us, we’d love to talk with you. This can be either full-time or part-time position.

Your responsibilities would be:

• Helping in dedicated Japanese / Chinese sections of our forum
• Representing us in local WordPress events (we pay all expenses)
• Helping WPML marketing efforts in your country and getting a 30% affiliate commission for that

This job will have a fixed pay and performance-based payment.

If you’re interested, please use our contact form and tell us a bit about yourself.

The nice thing was that WooCommerce uses WordPress in a very clean way. This allowed us to turn it multilingual without resorting to any hacks.

We added a few filters to WooCommerce, created a new glue plugins called ‘WooCommerce Multilingual’ and added a bit of support for the new functionality in WPML.

To try all this, you’ll need to download:

• WooCommerce 1.4 or above (it’s always a good idea to use the most recent version)
• WooCommerce Multilingual
• The recent WPML version (from your WPML account)

How it works

The glue plugin doesn’t have any GUI and there’s nothing to configure. It hooks to WooCommerce and makes it multilingual.

You’ll need to add translations for the standard shop pages and add the same shortcodes to them. This will let the checkout and other standard WooCommerce pages appear.

There’s a complete WooCommerce Multilingual Users Guide which you should read when you get started.

Translating products

Go to a product page. You’ll see the languages box. Add on the + icons to add translation. WPML automatically synchronizes the product attributes, such as cost, weight and other properties that should be the same for all languages.

You can also use WPML’s Translation Dashboard to mark products for translation and send all at once.

Shipping and inventory tracking

Shop owners will see all orders going through on the products in the default language. When visitors add products to the cart, WPML will convert them to the products in the default language. It coverts back to the current language for display purposes.

This means that you’re tracking inventory only once per product, no matter in which language it was ordered.

Email notifications

WPML will set the locale to the client’s language when you send your client emails. Meaning, if a client ordered a product when viewing it in French, the client will receive the notification emails in French. For this to happen, you need to have the .mo files for WooCommerce in each language.

Feedback?

This release is the result of weeks of planning and development. We’re eager to receive your feedback and hear about how it’s working for you. Once we know that things are good and complete, this will go into the WooCommerce official code and continue being maintained there.

The Domain Mapping and WPML tutorial include complete, step-by-steps for you to follow. There’s also a small patch for Domain Mapping, making it work correctly with WordPress 3.3.

Domain Mapping Configuration

Domains list

http://wpml.org/documentation/essential-multilingual-plugins/multilingual-site-network-with-domain-mapping/

Domain Mapping is a pretty complex plugin. Just like WPML, it also manipulates the URL rewrite rules for WordPress.

Domain Mapping works on the ‘domain’ part, while WPML works on the ‘page’ page. Theoretically, there should be no interaction between the plugins and we were happy to confirm that, using WordPress 3.3.

You’re welcome to leave comments here. For complete tech support, I suggest opening threads in our technical support forum.

We’re starting to work on an importer from qTranslate to WPML. This importer will convert the mixed-content that qTranslate creates into per-language posts and taxonomy.

How this works

qTranslate holds all content in the same post, taxonomy or custom field. WPML created different items per language. Without going into a discussion about what’s better, it’s clear that the migration process needs to address this.

Instead of one post that includes language meta tags, you’ll get several posts – one per language. Same goes for tags, categories (taxonomy in general) and custom fields.

Once this data migration is complete, a whole round of content fixup is needed. The importer will go through the new posts and update internal links. This way, existing content keeps pointing to valid posts and not to non-existing content.

The good

When you migrate to WPML, you’re going to get some immediate benefits. For starters, you get to use a plugin that’s actively maintained and enjoys a team of developers working on it full-time. You also get high-response support for each and every issue that you encounter.

To demonstrate this, WPML is always ready several weeks in advance of any new WordPress release.

Then, there’s SEO. Since WPML uses different posts per language, these posts come with their unique URLs. No more having the same post name in the URL. Now, each language gets its own unique permalink. That’s pretty major for search engines.

There are also nice things like having comments separated for each language. Most consider this a very important feature, other see it as an issue.

The bad

No matter how much we try, this import process is not going to be 100% automated. Unless you’re running a very simple blog, with just posts, tags and categories, something is not going to be included in this migration and you’ll have to transfer that data manually.

We’re doing our best to minimize this, so that 95% of the work is done for you. Due to the way qTranslate works, there’s an endless range of creative solutions that people have chosen to get things done.  Many of these are great hacks, but will not survive our import process.

We hope that the import process will cover the bulk of the work for you, so that your remaining migration tasks are reasonable.

How you can help

If you want to see this migration process become robust and comprehensive, we’ll need your help with testing data. Leave messages here, describing different cases and let us know you can send test databases. If you can also provide URLs to existing sites that you’re considering migrating, it will help us get a better picture. We’ll contact you directly to get those DBs from you.

We can’t promise the import process will cover everything, but we’ll certainly give it our best efforts.

Setting Up

Types creates three things:

• Custom post types
• Custom taxonomy
• Custom fields (meta boxes)

First, download Types from the WordPress plugins repository, install and activate it. Once setup, you’ll see this main menu:

Types menu

Click on Custom Types and Taxonomies to setup your own post and taxonomy types.

New custom post type

In the WordPress world, every piece of content is a post. This includes the standard posts and pages. When you want to add your unique content type, you’re creating a custom post type.

Taxonomy is the glue that connects related content together. List tags and categories group together related posts, so does custom taxonomy connect together custom post types. Custom taxonomy can connect any post type, including the standard types.

Click on Custom Fields to add meta-boxes to the WordPress editor.

New custom-fields group

Types arranges custom fields in groups. It lets you select which group to display on different content types.

Groups have fields. You can choose standard fields, such as single-line and multi-line text inputs, or more complex fields such as file, image or Skype contact.

Click on Add a custom fields group. Give it a name and an optional description and add fields by clicking on their names from the list at the top-right.

Adding a custom field

Once you’ve added a field, you can configure it. Give it a name and a description. Each type of field has its own unique setup.

This is how a group looks like on Edit screens:

Types custom fields in the content editing screen

You can see various types of fields, including text, check-box and image uploads.

Displaying Custom Fields

You’ll notice that there’s a shortcode hint below different fields in the editor screens. These shortcodes allow to include the fields in the page content. When authors enter these shortcodes to the text, Types will replace them with the field content.

Custom field display is different for each field type. Text fields simply output their value. Check-boxes and radio groups will display the respective text for their state. Image fields output the images (allowing you to choose image dimensions) and other special fields have unique display options.

Authors can use the T icon, at the top of edit screens to choose from available fields to insert.

Inserting custom fields to content

If you want to add fields to templates (so that they appear on all pages of the same type), you can use Views, to generate dynamic templates, or edit the template PHP files and use Types API calls to display fields.

Data Validation

Fields can also validate user-input. You can set any field as ‘required’. Other fields have other validation options. For example, numeric fields will check that users only enter numbers and email fields will validate for well-formatted email addresses. You can enable or disable each of these validations, per field.

When authors enter content and validation fails, Types will highlight the incorrect fields and instruct users to edit them.

Custom-Field Translation Options

Types lets you choose what to do when translating content that includes these custom fields. By default, WPML will translate text fields and copy non-text fields. This means that images, check-boxes and numeric values will auto-synchronize between the original content and translations and texts will get translated.

Multilingual Admin Screens

WPML lets different users have different admin languages. This is especially useful if there are different people configuring and running the site.

All the texts that you enter in Types appear in WPML’s String Translation screen. This includes names, descriptions and labels and field values.

Translating Types string in the String Translation screen

Once you translate these texts in the String Translation screen, users will see the localized languages on the WordPress Admin, as well as on public pages.

Translating Custom-Type Content

The central location for controlling what is multilingual is in WPML->Translation Management->Multilingual content setup. There, you will see all the custom types that you’ve added (post types, taxonomy and fields). Once you make custom types translatable, you’ll get the familiar translation controls in their lists screen. You’ll also be able to choose the in the Translation Dashboard.

WPML automatically adjusts the translation editor and according to the setup of different custom fields.

Custom fields in the Translation Editor

When you translate content that includes a custom field, you’ll notice that the name and description show for them. This allows translators to understand what they’s translating and where the text goes to.

Download, Cost and Support

Types is free. You can download it from the WordPress plugin repository:

http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/types/

You’re welcome to read tutorials and complete reference documentation in Types & Views website.

Views is a powerful compliment to Types, allowing to display custom data without any coding. We’re offering commercial support for both Types and Views through the support forums on http://wp-types.com.

Views and expert support for both plugins for one year costs $49 (USD).