Roadmap
Our mission is to enable building full rich multilingual websites with WordPress, running WPML. Here’s a rough roadmap with features we’re either working on right now or are planned soon.
| Section | Feature | Description | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
| Navigation | Offsite pages | Allow mapping external URLs to pages. This will serve to build menu items that lead to offsite URLs. For example, we’ll be able create a page called ‘Forum’, which will lead to http://forum.wpml.org. That menu item will exist in both top navigation and sidebar navigation. Without this feature, only pages in the WordPress site can be included in the navigation. | Done in 1.0.0 |
| Custom HTML for menus | Add a callback function which will run when generating the top navigation. This function will be able to return any HTML that will be used for the menu items. Advanced users can build fancy menus that include images, Flash and any other visual effect which the plugin doesn’t render. | Done in 1.0.3 | |
| Page arrangement management | We want to create central management for page arrangement. This will allow controlling page order, section grouping, mini-home control and exclusion from navigation. Right now, these attributes can only be controlled by editing each page individually, making it difficult to see the big picture (like which page comes before which other). | Planned feature | |
| Flexible display for blog page in navigation | Make the blog page work like other regular pages in the top navigation, including selection for child items. | Done in 1.3.4 | |
| Multilingual system | Set admin language per user | Sites that are being managed by several authors will be able to work in different languages (in the backend). Each author will select the admin-language. Then, the entire administration will be done in that language. This feature is only relevant for administration. Visitors will still see contents in the correct language. | Done in 1.3.0 |
| Custom language selector | Allow implementing user functions for the language selector. These functions can then be included in the theme and produce the language selectors in any way users like. Instead of offering dozens of configuration options for our default language selector, we’ll make it easy for people to build their own. WPML will provide a function that returns the list of languages, indicating which language is currently active. It will return the language names in the currently displayed language and their native names. | Done in 0.99. | |
| Include translation for strings | This will allow translating texts that are not inside pages, posts, tags or categories. Such texts can be the tagline, title, text widgets and others. It also includes an API for other plugins to translate user texts. | Done in 1.2.0 | |
| Create API for controlling language attributes | Other plugins and remote devices (such as iPhone or BlackBerry) will be able to create multilingual contents, the same as using WordPress’ admin panel. | Done in 1.5.1 | |
| Comment translation | This will allow managing comments in different languages. To read and moderate, WPML will do machine translation (quick, free and inaccurate). When admins reply, they will be able to get professional translation for their comments. | Done in 1.3.0 | |
| Synchronize properties between translations | Will allow synchronizing between various post and page options between translations so that once set in one language it will also update in others. | Done in 1.5.1 | |
| Quick translation overview | Add a languages column to pages and posts list to allow quick access to translations and one click translation creation. | Done in 1.3.1 | |
| Compatibility packages for popular themes and plugins | This will allow running themes and plugins multilingual with WPML without having to edit them. Instead of creating special versions for popular themes, we’ll use the theme’s hooks to make theme multilingual. | Done in 1.5.1 | |
| A global translations repository | WPML will download and share translations for plugins and themes through the String Translation mechanism. Translators will be kept in a global repository. | Early planning stage | |
| Content translation | Translation service integration | Include interface for content translation by ICanLocalize. This will allow running multilingual to people who don’t want to do the translation themselves. | Done in 1.0.0 |
| Translate texts by other plugins | Some sites use plugins that add texts to pages and posts. For example, the very popular ‘All in one SEO’ adds fields that manipulate the pages description, title and name. This feature will allow creating these texts in the translation. What we’ll do is allow supporting texts in custom fields and in linked tables. | Done in 1.2.0 |
Schedule
- End of may: Include the content translation section. This is almost done and we’re already working with some Beta sites for testing it. Of course, as it becomes fully functional, you’ll also see own own wpml.org in several languages.
- July: More multilingual features including string translation and translation management for texts by other plugins.
- August: Comment translation and API functions.
- September, October: Usability improvements and speed optimizations (eliminate redundant DB access).
- November: Compatibility packages for popular themes and plugins.
- December: Support for localizing texts in other plugins.
- January: Single language mode, allowing WPML to be used as a translation tool for WordPress.
- February: Global plugins and themes translation repository.
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I love your WPML plugin. After using WordPress for years, I had not been able to find a plugin that would make our site multilingual. Now, thanks to YOU and your very professional plugin we are very close to having a site where the entire world will be able to easily access. That’s a HUGE thing and it’s because of you!!! Thanks so much.
P.S., On this page , your description sentence starts with,”Our missing is to enable building full rich multilingual…” I’m thinking you meant to say “Mission” and not “Missing”.
Hope this helps AND thanks a bunch again!!!
Hi Randy,
Thanks for the kind feedback. When you’re happy with the way it works for you, drop me a note. I’ll be very happy to add your site to the showcase page I’m working on.
And thanks for catching that typo. Just fixed it!
I also think that your plugin changes the game and brings WordPress at par with Drupal in terms of multi-lingual support. There’s still a lot of work ahead, but I see that you’re on the right course. Congrats and look forward to 1.0 release!
Hi Nikolay,
Thanks for the warm feedback. Anything like that gives us great back wind and helps the development.
We ourselves are pretty heavy Drupal and WordPress users. I find there are excellent features that Drupal offers but hate to pay the complexity price tag associated with any little thing.
The major challenge here is to add the power, but keep it simple. For that we need people to review and comment. Every developer tends to fall in love with his own work (including us), causing to ignore root problems. We need others to tell us when it’s getting too complicated, so that we can keep on track.
Hi.
first of all, thanks a lot for putting such a great plug-in out there. Awesome.
Now to the question: What does ‘coming soon’ in regards to the country flag support? This really something that is missing from my point of view.
Or can you hint to some kind of workaround. I’ve tweaked around with the code a bit, but I can’t really get it to work… unfortunately..
Best
P.S. when that problem is solved I’ll have a website for the showcase as well
In the next minor release, we’ll already add the per-country class in the languages drop down menu.
With a little bit of CSS effort, this will allow you to add the country flags yourself. This will be released either this week, or early next week.
Later (in about a month), we’re back to adding major features. Once of them would be creating much more flexible language selectors.
sounds awesome. thank you!
Hi William,
The upcoming release of WPML will include the built in support for country flags and a very powerful function which will allow you to build your own language switchers very easily. It’s already documented here:
http://wpml.org/home/getting-started-guide/language-setup/custom-language-switcher/
We’ve pushing it into the upcoming release (0.99).
Are you subscribed to our email notifications? We’ll announce it as soon as that release is out.
Hi,
this plugins saves a lot of work, because the alternative would have been to install different Wordpresses for each language. Thanx a lot!
I’m looking forward to the .99-Version with the country-flag-support. Hopefully you are able to release it next week.
bye Det
I haven’t used this plugin much yet, but what I have seen I love!! It’s very fluid in my dev. environment.
Hopefully, this project will not go the way of Gengo which was full of promise but hasn’t been upkept and is now conflicting with a number of other plugins. I may have to convert an entire site from Gengo to WPML if I want to upgrade the basic WP install.
Hi, I just did a migration from Gengo to wpml and I created some SQL snippets that map gengo’s model to wpml. you can find them on my blog.
This might be useful for wpml to eventually create a conversion tool.
Cheers Marco
Hi Marco,
We’re going to add a complete API for managing the language information in WPML 1.3. This will allow to set languages for posts, pages, tags and categories, associate translations and do everything you can from the admin panel.
When this is ready, it will be possible to write a mini migration plugin that populates WPML’s language tables according to Gengo language data. From your post it looks like you would be able to create such a plugin pretty easily. If you decide to do it, we’ll give you all the support that you need and also feature this plugin here.
Hi
I would like to know if the feature “Set admin language per user” will soon be implemented in the plugin. Do you have an approximate date ?
This would be great to have such a feature. I don’t know exactly how you will do it, but it would be nice if users could choose the language they want at the moment of registration.
I’ll be waiting for this…
Thank you !
We’ll probably be able to have it working for WPML 1.2. This week we’re closing WPML 1.1 and then moving to version 1.2 features.
I estimate in about a month.
Amir
Thank you for letting me know !
Then I’ll wait.
Raphael
great plugin, keep up the good work. i’m going to use it on my new site
Hi,
The comments-localisation is something I’ve never been able to achieve in a satisfying way on other popular blogging platforms sofar.
The feature I’ve been looking for is :
- easy way to access comments for a localised page/post (let’s call them ‘main comments’)
- easy way to access comments for the different other versions of that same post/page. (let’s call them secondary, all this being a question of context)
so that : I can, in my themes, display the main comments for a page/post normally, AND the secondary comments in a smaller greyed font. This helps keep pages dynamic and show people that if there are not many comments in their own language, other communities on the website are active. Same as the “empty/full” restaurant incentive. Full restaurant drives you in, empty drives you out. But it also enables users to skip comments in the other languages to go directly for thos in their own language.
And automatic/paid comments translation is a cool feature.
So glad you are paying special attention to this Comments feature, as they are so important on community driven websites. Just another proof of your thoroughness.
Great plugin, I’m starting to really enjoy possibilities it offers.
Just one small suggestion: Maybe an Esperanto flag could find it’s place among the others.
Keep up the good work!
Thanks for your great plugin. I have one question. Is it possible to translate links (change title a image)?
Looks like a great plugin… I ran Gengo for a while but had problems and the developers vanished — been looking for a solution ever since.
Here’s a request for when you’ll be developing packages to adapt popular themes to WPML: do one for Headway Themes ASAP (or maybe it’s working already? I’m about to install Headway and will test it).
Since you need to wait for Thesis to reach 2.0 — and it could take a while — before adapting it to WPML, working on Headway in the mean times would be greatly appreciated.
Thanks for your dedication to this project!
Same thing for Headway as for Thesis – as soon as the theme developers get interested in cooperating on this, we can provide a solution in a few days.
We’re not going to reverse engineer and hack their theme. To go multilingual, WPML will need to have some hooks placed in the theme. It’s trivial work, but the theme developers need to do it.
Have a word with them and see if they’re interested.
Uau, this plugin looks really good and professional. I’ve just no started using it and I already love it.
Thanks,
Nuno
Very nice plugin. Helped me a lot. Even “Google XML Sitemap”-plugin can make sitemap from translated pages. Its awesome. Thi is the best blugin for translation. I was using qTranslate before, but now I changed my mind. Thanks alot.
P.S. Can You send the .pot file to my e-mail or just say where can I find it and I will try to translate this plugin on my free time. Thanks.
Hi Amir,
I speak 3 languages: English, Spanish and Portuguese.
I have a site in English and a site in Portuguese.
When this plug in is installed on the http://www.APayPlanForLife.com, will this plug in translate the English site into Spanish? Or will I have to translate myself?
Thanks in advance for your reply.
Cleia
@Cleia
I translated my site myself using this plugin.