Right now, we’re starting the final testing with the Jigo team. If you’re interested, please leave messages here and we’ll send you private test versions early next week.

Have a great Easter, Pesah or whatever other excuse for eating and meeting with family

New features in this release are:

• Multiple-currencies – now, you can enable more than one currency in WooCommerce and have a different price (in a different currency), for each language.
• Synchronization of product variations – variations are always a complex thing, but this release makes it much simpler. When you edit variations in the default language, the same variations become available in the translations.
• Fully translatable attributes – standard and custom product properties are now fully translatable, via WPML’s String Translation module.

Besides these additions, we’ve also included tons of bug fixes, that help your multilingual store run smooth.

When you use WooCommerce multilingual, remember to also enable WPML (core), WPML String Translation and WPML Translation Management to enjoy all the new features on this release.

Want to test out WooCommerce Multilingual 1.1b?

You’ll need to download:

• WooCommerce 1.5 – you need this development version, which includes stuff that isn’t yet available in the official release
• WooCommerce Multilingual 1.1b2
• The recent WPML version (from your WPML account)

Translating attributes

Go to Products -> Attributes -> Configure terms. At the top of the page you’ll see the available languages.

Translating attributes

To do the actual translation, go to WPML -> String Translation and search for the name of the attribute group. They all are under the ‘woocommerce’ textdomain.

Translating the name of the attribute group

Adding currencies

Go to WPML -> WooCommerce Multilingual, click on the ‘Enable multi-currency’ checkbox and the ‘save’ button. Then select the language you want, enter the currency symbol and the exchange rate (the default currency to the current). Click on the ‘Add’ button.

Note: By default WooCommerce currency is set to ‘Pounds sterling’, you can change it in the WooCommerce -> Settings page.

Adding currencies

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

Let us know

We’d love to hear how this is working for you. Leave comments here to tell us, or show us your multilingual e-commerce sites. If you need technical help, the best place is in our forum.

Although there’s no big new feature, this update is highly recommended for everyone. This release fixes some 36 issues. None of these issues was a showstopper, but they needed fixed none-the-less.

Fix highlights:

• URL preview display bug for some pages
• Non-English characters not converted to equivalent English chars in post slug
• Language switcher CSS positioning on the admin dashboard
• Inconsistent messages about translator actions with WPML’s Translation Editor
• Warning popup messages showing in wrong places
• Compatibility problems with WordPress 3.0.x and 3.1.x (are you still using that?)
• Pagination and search not working together for String Translation
• Gravity Forms integration issues
• IE7 Javascript issues
• Sticky Links not processed correctly for some links
• Stick Links not reverting correctly in some cases
• HTML entities not processed correctly for some fields when coming back from ICanLocalize.com translation
• Fixed the display of the admin language switcher for RTL WordPress administrators

and a bunch of PHP notices in different place…

You’re probably wondering how comes we got so obsessed with hunting down every tiny little issue.

Well, meet Bigul. Bigul is our new QA chief. He’s taking WPML and shaking it like never before. Then, he shakes some more and doesn’t stop until all the bolts and screws are fastened properly.

The changes are applied to all of WPML’s components. Please update WPML core and every addon plugin that you’re using. I hope that you enjoy this new release and the additional stability it brings.

Now that we’ve handled all these issues and we have a solid QA process, we’re getting back to adding more new features. I’ll write much more about it as we’re getting closer to WPML 2.5.0.

This release improves compatibility with the current BuddyPress (today, it’s 1.5.3.1). It fixes a number of bugs and feature gaps that opened since our last release.

To try this, download the current Beta:

bpml.1.3.0-b2.zip

Thanks for everyone who’s helping with testing and feedback!

The bug caused the permalinks preview box to display incorrect URLs in certain cases. It’s a long story, full of drama and boring SQL. The bottom line is, that if you’re seeing incorrect URLs in the permalinks preview, when editing posts, this beta should solve it for you.

It’s not a critical bug. This error is only in the preview. The actual page URLs are fine. However, if you click on that ‘view post’ button, you’ll get to a 404 page, since the preview URL is not correct. The actual pages display normally when you navigate to their correct URLs.

How to download

To download this fix, log in to your WPML account. Go to Downloads, scroll all the way to the bottom and download the recent beta version. The beta version is a ZIP that contains other ZIPs. Unzip it locally and upload the WPML components that you’re using.

When’s the final 2.4.3 release?

We have a few more really minor bugs to clean and then we’ll release WPML 2.4.3. Besides this glitch, 2.4.3 fixes a number of other issues, which are less obvious. This permalink preview thing is very noticeable and disturbs many of you, so we released this version today.

Let us know

If you’re still seeing anything wrote, please report in the forum. Sorry for all the trouble and thanks for your patience!

Displaying Untranslated Content

It turns out that displaying untranslated content across different languages is not as simple as you’d think. WPML 2.4.2 supports this by allowing you to duplicate that content to different languages. For example, if you want English blog posts to appear in Spanish, you can duplicate them all in one go.

To see how to duplicate content in different languages, have a look at the previous post about it.

There are interesting results to this and we hope that we have them all covered.

For example, if your Spanish blog now includes English posts, you want search engines to understand what’s going on.

Google will assume that your Spanish blog contains Spanish content. We’re added a way for you to tell Google that these duplicate posts are indeed in English and where they’re coming from.

First, all Spanish posts will include the rel=”canonical” tag, linking to the original English post.

Then, your index page (where different posts are displayed) will include a mix of content in different languages. There’s a way to handle this as well.

We’ve added a new API call - wpml_get_language_information.

This returns an array that contains the locale, language name, text direction and other useful information. If you’re planning to display untranslated content, we recommend that you call this function in your theme and wrap texts in language information. This will tell Google exactly how to understand what it sees.

Translating Custom Fields using a Visual Editor (WYSIWYG)

If you’re using Types to manage custom fields and custom post types (and you should), you now have a way to create custom fields that use the native WordPress Visual editor. This means that you can have different full-featured editors for different parts of posts.

WPML 2.4.2 follows and allows your translators to use WYSIWYG editors. When you use WPML’s Translation Editor and send content to translation, WPML automatically adjusts the translation interface to display fields in the same way writers see them.

It supports single-line fields, text-area (multiple lines) and now, also WYSIWYG fields.

SEO Love with Per-Language Sitemaps

This version of WPML also includes a fix for a very old problem. When you use languages-per-domains, you’ll need a separate XML sitemap to give to Google. If your single sitemap includes all pages, in all languages, Google rejects it.

WPML 2.4.2 adds support for creating per-domain sitemap with Yoast’s WordPress SEO plugin (which we use and recommend).

When you use WPML 2.4.2 together with WordPress SEO (version 1.1.1 and above), you’ll get individual sitemaps – one per language.

Open your sitemap_index.xml and you’ll see links to the different sitemaps per type and language. It will look like this:

http://wpml.local/post-sitemap.xml

http://wpml.local/page-sitemap.xml

http://wpml.local/category-sitemap.xml

http://fr.wpml.local/post-fr-sitemap.xml

http://fr.wpml.local/page-fr-sitemap.xml

http://fr.wpml.local/category-fr-sitemap.xml

http://de.wpml.local/post-de-sitemap.xml

http://de.wpml.local/page-de-sitemap.xml

http://de.wpml.local/category-de-sitemap.xml

http://es.wpml.local/post-es-sitemap.xml

http://es.wpml.local/page-es-sitemap.xml

http://es.wpml.local/category-es-sitemap.xml

In the Google Webmasters console, you need to submit all the sitemaps for each language. So, for instance, in our Spanish domain, we’ll need to submit:

http://es.wpml.local/post-es-sitemap.xml

http://es.wpml.local/page-es-sitemap.xml

http://es.wpml.local/category-es-sitemap.xml

It’s been a pleasure working with Joost on this functionality. You can expect more great stuff for multilingual SEO in the near future.

Bugs Fixed

The joy is never complete without a few bugs to crush. In this release, we’ve significantly improved handling duplicate slugs. This is something that we added to WPML 2.4.1, but had some glitches in some cases. Now, it looks like all cases are handled.

We also included fixes for everything reported in the forum until now. I you have anything that’s not working as expected, don’t hold hack. Let us know about it.

Oh, and I almost forgot, Happy WordPress 3.3! (yes, WPML has been WP 3.3 compatible for a few weeks now)

Remember how you’d like your blog posts to appear in different languages (but without accidentally switching language) and how you wished you didn’t have to duplicate stuff when translation is not needed?

WPML 2.4.2 does all this, and more!

We talked about it a couple of months ago and now it’s ready for your testing pleasure. It’s very difficult to display content in a different language. This causes a host of issues, especially with keeping navigation in the right language.

Instead, we’ve added a new content duplication mechanism. This will allow you to create the same content for different languages, without sweating over it. Just choose what to duplicate and WPML keeps all translations in-sync with the original.

This means that you can blog, setup products and create your portfolio in just one language and have it displayed in all language.

The new content duplication logic is part of the Translation Management module, so it’s only available if you’re using the Multilingual CMS package.

Duplicating Content from the Editor

When you edit any content (post, page or custom types), you’ll see this new set of check-boxes in the Translate yourself section. Choose the languages you want to duplicate to and click on the Duplicate button at the bottom.

Duplicating content from within the editor

WPML creates the same content in the languages you’ve selected. Whenever you edit the original, duplicates will update as well.

If you later decide to translate these duplicates yourself, click on the pencil icon to edit them. There, WPML shows you that they are duplicates. Click on the button to translate them individually and start editing.

Batch-Duplicating Using the Translation Dashboard

When you want to duplicate a large amount of content, all at once, use WPML’s Translation Dashboard.

Duplicating content via the Translation Dashboard

Choose the content to duplicate. Next to each language, there’s a new option to duplicate. Click on Send content and you’re done.

It doesn’t matter if you’re selecting content from the Translation Dashboard or from edit pages. You can later edit that content and make it independent or turn existing translations (which are actual duplicate content) into duplicates.

WPML Tells Google Where the Original Is

In case you don’t know it, WordPress has a way of telling search engines where content originates from. The rel=”canonical” tag indicates the original URL of every piece of content. This way, if it appears in several URLs, search engines know where to list it on.

Since now, WPML knows that duplicate content is indeed duplicate, it communicates this information. The rel=”canonical” tag will point to the URL of the default language.

This way, Google doesn’t mistake you for trying to SPAM it and always knows where the original content is.

Download and Test

As always, you can get Beta versions from your WPML account.

Login to your account, click on Downloads and scroll all the way down.

We’re looking for feedback about this new workflow. If you’re running a site that needs extensive content duplication, we suggest that you take this new feature for a test run and let us know how it’s working for you.

This is a maintenance release, without new features, except that it works with the current BuddyPress version. This is still a major change, as many hooks and filters have moved, as well as different output in BuddyPress 1.5.1.

To get this release, head over to the BuddyPress Multilingual page in the WordPress plugins repository.

We say this before any upgrade – please backup your database before upgrading. Although there’s no database migration, it’s better to be safe than sorry.

Like BuddyPress Multilingual? Leave a comment here and don’t forget to return to the download page and indicate that it’s working for you.

From all the folks behind WPML, have a good weekend, wherever you are!

This time, the bugs list is relatively modest. We changed the logic in some places to allow large sites with many users to run with less memory. WPML loaded the entire table of users and posts in several odd places. This is no longer the case and now much less memory is needed on these specific Admin pages. This was something that we actually found on our own site, as it grows bigger and busier every day.

Other bugs were related to language redirect cookies for Safari, better styling for the language switcher in menus, translation for author descriptions and the title of our own languages widget.

And now, for the really fun stuff…

Duplicate post names (slugs) for different languages

I think that this has been the most frequently requested feature, starting with WPML 0.9.3. Now, you can have pages like:

• /blog/
• /es/blog/
• /de/blog

It’s especially important when pages receive the names of products. Then, you really don’t want to have something like:

• /sony/
• /es/sony-2/ (ouch)

For a while now, WPML resolved first the language and only then the post. This fix hooks to the WordPress function that adds the integer suffix and changes it so that it too only checks for pages in the same language.

If you want to rename existing content in your site, simply edit the slugs. WordPress will now permit having translations with the same name and slug.

Custom Types and Fields Plugin

In case you’re interested, we haven’t completely forgotten about our plugin for managing custom types and fields. In fact, it’s ready for release. We’re just ironing out a few last issue with the new website and it’s up. I’ll write all about it in the next post.