FAQ

The upgrade process includes deactivating the current version, deleting it from the server and replacing with the new version. Please read the complete FAQ to make sure you’re doing it right.

Lucky for us, WordPress has anticipated situations where things don’t quite go as planned and included debug facilities which will show you what the problem is. Have a look at the debugging WPML page to see how to activate the different debug resources and where to report problems.

In order for String Translation to work, your theme (and plugins) must pass texts through translation calls. See this FAQ for how to wrap texts in GetText calls, so that WPML can translate them.

WPML is licensed under GPL. This means that you are free to do whatever you want with the code. You can use it on as many sites as you like, for whatever use and even modify the code.

When you activate WPML, it adds language attributes to all existing content. If the activation process is interrupted, some content may be missing because it has no language. Read this FAQ for instructions on how to repeat the initialization process and get all your content to show again.

If your widgets include translatable strings, you’ll be able to edit the translation with WPML, but translations are not guaranteed to display on the site. Method 1) Using WordPress’ filters WPML uses the standard WordPress filters and translates content that you filter. All the standard WordPress widgets apply filters by default. When you create your [...]

WPML can serve different languages from different domains or sub-domains. For this to work, some setup is required in your web server. We’ll start with the theory of how it works, so that you understand how to set it up on your own server. When a request comes in, this is what happens: The DNS [...]

To make custom types in WordPress multilingual, your custom types need to be declared according to the recommended WordPress procedure: Make sure they’re registered on the ‘init‘ hook Never use a GetText call for the custom post type Always use the constants TRUE and FALSE. 0 and 1 may not work. Check the WordPress Codex [...]

If you site shows question marks for non-English characters, most chances are your database character encoding is different than UTF-8. If you’re using PHPMyAdmin, the structure of your wp_posts table should look like this: If you see a different value for the collation, it means that the character encoding is wrong. This will cause text [...]

If you can’t get past the language configuration wizard, there’s probably something wrong between WPML, your theme and other plugins. This FAQ will help you identify these problems, so that we can find a solution and get you going. 1. Enable a PHP debug file When you activate WPML, it creates language tables in your [...]

Many themes are already multilingual-ready. Read this FAQ for common pitfalls and how you can avoid them when creating new WordPress themes.

When you enable languages in directories, you’re telling WPML to arrange translations in what appears like different virtual directories. For example: www.example.com www.example.com/es/ www.example.com/ja/ For this to work, Apache’s rewrite module must be enabled and the site needs to use a ‘fancy’ permalink structure (e.g., anything different than the default permalinks). Then, go to WPML->Languages [...]

If your translated pages appear slower than the original pages, there are a few things you can do. First, be sure to check where problems are coming from. We use the Debug Queries plugin to check DB access and PHP processing. When you see an unexpectedly large number of queries, go through these potential sources. [...]

WPML has two features which are great for translating, but make everything work slow – just for you (not for visitors). You can disable them. Go to WPML->String Translation. The first thing is: “Track where string appear on the site” With this, WPML keeps record of the PHP and HTML that called strings in the [...]

Many themes and plugins save texts in the wp_options table. WPML makes them translatable via the String Translation module. Let’s start at the end. Supposing that your code has something like: <?php echo(get_option(“footer_text”)) ?> To translate this text, you don’t need to edit anything in the code. You need to enable WPML’s String Translation module [...]