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What Percentage of WPML Are You Using?

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They say that we only use 10% of our brain and we’re doing just fine. However, if we use 100% of it, we would become superheroes. I want to help you become WPML experts, so that you can build great multilingual websites with minimal effort.

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.

95 Responses to “What Percentage of WPML Are You Using?”

  1. Thx for your effort, but I already use majority of WPML functionalities so I don’t need extra trainings (examined your documentation which is, BTW, very good: structured and detailed).
    Only thing that bothers me (and it is not quite related to this topic here) is to have (in the future) possibility to use “translation memory” in WPML without need to use any (external) CAT tools. This would be fantastic – for us as well as for you guys! 🙂

    • I’m very happy to hear that you’re happy with the existing documentation.

      Translation Memory for WPML is a pretty huge thing. To be honest, we’re not going to be able to build something like that in the near future.

      • Amir, thx for your fast answer, I appreciate your speed ad directness, nevertheless of the (current) answer.
        I plan to use WPML plugin in many years to come (because it is currently simply the best multilingual WP plugin – I believe you’ll make an effort to stay like this in the future :-)). Therefore, it is plenty of time in the following years that this topic starts “to move” with positive development trends, especially taking into consideration how fast WP evolve by himself. I’m optimistic and I have plenty of time… just keep up going as you started and all others will (naturally) follow. Best regards, Ivica

        • Thanks again. I’m not saying that we’re not going to do that.

          Just so you know, for the upcoming release, we’re focusing on several medium-sized features and WordPress 3.4 compatibility.

          After that, we have several important performance optimizations coming up. Then, we’ll see what next.

          • Thx Amir! I’m a “believer” – I believe that it is doable, in some period of time, with your resources free, and if this functionality is very complex so you need a lot of time and investment to build it up – why not to offer it as additionally paid plugin, who need it – will pay it 🙂

  3. A couple of months ago I tried to use WPML with the woo commerce plugin and never got it fully working either due to wpml itself or my lack of knowledge. I’d love to finish that task..

  4. I got every extension of WPML and even don t know witch can translate the widgets !
    String Translation for what?
    Translation Management How ?
    Sticky Links
    XLIFF ???
    I m really lost

    A french “how to do book”would be quite usefull …
    It a about translation non ??

    From french Québec

    • Widget titles should appear in WPML’s String Translation. You should enable it.

      Next, enable ‘translate with WPML’ by WPML in ‘WPML->Theme and plugin localization’. Then, go to WPML->String Translation and you should see the widget titles there.

  5. String Translation
    Translation Management
    Media
    and Ecommerce glue (marketpress – which does not fully work for me)

  7. I’ve just put together a bilingual site using WPML. The biggest hurdle I’ve come up to so far is how to configure a drop down language switcher so it defaults to the language not currently on display.

    I’ve read through a few posts on the forum and this seems to be a common problem. It also seems like something that should be happening anyway. I doesn’t make sense to me that the language switcher defaults to the language on display, and I’d rather not give it a title of “Languages”.

    Saying that, I’ve found the rest of WPML easy to configure and feel positive about handing over the end product to my client.

    So thanks!

  8. Just got your info on upcoming training. That’s great. We haven’t used the features enough to even know what our needs are at this point–still building our website BUT I love how customer oriented you and your team is–seeking out comments and suggestions! Thank you!

  9. I only use core and string translation. My biggest problem is an SEO tool that works in Japanese. Yoast WordPress SEO doesn’t really work for Japanese. I have all translation done manually. Machine translation for Japanese doesn’t work.

    • Yoast SEO plugin is translated to Japanese using automatic translation? I had no idea that this is the case and I’m not even sure that Yoast knows about this.

  10. I would love more explanation on how to change language selector to buttons or something more appealing. I asked about this in the forum and I was directed to your instructions, but when I searched in my editor for what I needed, I couldn’t find anything that resembled what your instructions were saying. Its been a couple of months so I don’t remember the specifics, just that the instructions didn’t match what was in my wordpress editor.

    Hope that made sense

    • Yes, makes sense. I see that more information about custom language switchers are pretty high in demand here.

  11. Hi there,

    I have been using WPML for a couple of months and it is the best translation plugin ever (hand down). But it is not perfect:

    1. Can the WPML team translate mingle plugin(buddypress’counterpart), mingle forum, popup! and photocontest?
    I would like to display the same forum in both french and english parts of my site.

    2. A translated plugin (via WPML) should generate “n” pages (n depends on the number of languages you have). For example, a user’s profile page is http://www.b.org/peter (EN) and http://www.b.org/fr/peter (FN). I know it is bad for SEO because of duplicate content but you did for buddypress, right? Plus webmasters should be able to turn off this option if they do not like it.
    Example 2, a contest is on this page: http://www.b.org/contest1 and this page too http://www.b.org/contest2

    3. Apparently, WPML is not compatible with sliders (pointelle in my case).

    Plus, it would be nice if we could change our logo (image) according to the language of the site.

    Here are my feedbacks on this amazing plugin

    • We’ve created a glue plugin for BuddyPress, but I guess that you’re looking for something a bit different. Can you tell me where you’re getting it from?

      To have multilingual sliders, we’ll need to look at the slider code. Many sliders work fine with WPML. For example, you can look at our own slider on this site:
      https://toolset.com

      It really depends how the slider is coded and what’s configured in WPML. Maybe it can work, but requires different configuration. I’ll certainly cover configuring WPML to translate custom post types and fields (which should be very relevant to your slider) and also which WordPress API calls WPML filters.

      A different logo for different language also depends on how it’s added to the HTML. If you can edit the theme’s source files, edit header.php and wrap the logo in a GetText call. This will make WPML able to translate it via the String Translation module. It’s on our planned training as well.

    • Hello Amir,
      Thanks for your quick reply.

      Actually, I tested Buddypress multilingual and it is good (however my wordpress theme is incompatible with buddypress). Can you do a glue plugin for WP Mingle?

      Here are the dowload URL of the plugins I need a translation:
      WP MINGLE: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mingle/
      Mingle Forum: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/mingle-forum/
      Photocontest: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wp-photocontest/

      I will take a look at your future tutorials then. Tweaking my website’s code is not something I like but looks like I gonna have to do it.

      Actually, my slider works on my site but the content does not change according the language.
      Here is the code of pointelle slider:

      • We’ll need to look at Mingle in more details to tell what’s actually needed. Thanks for the links.

        About the slider, can you get the slider developer involved in our forum, so that them and our support folks can understand this?

  12. I believe using not more than 40 % of WPML? When I will be enough familiar to use more than 60 % of it. then I will really benefit of it numerous possibilities. One of my questions is very basic: why when translating pots from French to English I have easily correspondance between french posts and English posts. But when I want to do the same thing for pages, each time I try to pass from French to English and vice versa, there is never correspondance.
    My second question is also basic: is WPML offering automatic translation without the intervention of a human translator? Like Google and other automatic translators? I suppose yes and that it is me we doesn’t know how to use it?

    • What you’re experiencing with pages translation shouldn’t happen. You’ll need to go to our forum and explain this to the support people. I’m sure they can work with you and find the cause of this (and fix it for you).

      WPML doesn’t do any machine translation. It’s a tool for you to maintain translations. There are different methods that WPML lets you translate:
      http://wpml.org/documentation/translating-your-contents/

  13. I would suggest having very easy to understand, non-technical tutorials for those of us who are not web savvy programmers.
    I know you guys mean well with the written tutorials you have posted on your site now but I found them very difficult to follow when I was first setting up my site.

  14. Im currently working on and learning about plugin
    so far Im really impressed with string translation.
    It would be great if text in widget could be red as string, but I can guess that’s probably not possible

    Im interested to know more about:
    – Sticky Links
    – Multiple e-commerce glues
    – CMS Navigation

    Anyway screencasts are my favorite way of fast learning.

    Best regards!

    • Thanks. I personally also enjoy watching videos. I find myself exhausted at the end of the day and it’s pretty nice to sit back and let a video do all the explanation. I’ll see if we can have videos in our training. Maybe not in all, but at least in some.

      • Hello Amir,

        there’s a WordPress-Plug-In called Option-Tree which manages the “Home Site” of your WordPress-Site. It’s used in Plug-Ins from ThemeForest, in my Case in a Theme called Reaction. With Option-Tree you can manage the Frontpage-Slider, Blurbs and the Short-Text for the “From the Blog-Roll” The Articles in the “From the Blog-Roll” change, but the Text stays the same.
        The Page on which this Plug-In is used is Bluetone

  17. Modify your system so pages load faster. One place to start is to NOT reload the page header and footer from the server.

    Thanks for all you do working with theme providers. This has been very helpful.

  18. I need a better understanding of how to…
    1. control the position and styles of the drop down menu that select a language, and
    2. set up my top-level navigation menu so it appears in the selected language.

  19. How to successfully implement a multilingual eCommerce site on WordPress.

    This would really tie the knot for me in terms of using WPML on a lot more projects.

    I played around with the Get Shopped WPECom plugin + WPML and never really got far with it. I’d be gratefull to see a complete tutorial on how to implement the two from scratch.

    WPECom is still my first choice but if it is deemed incompatible I am open to any other WordPress ecommerce solutions that work with WPML.

  20. I am really excited about the training. I’ve had great success using WPML for numerous clients and various languages, and would love to see how other people come up with solutions for multi-lingual sites. Generally I use:

    Core
    String Translation
    Translation Management
    Media Translation
    CMS Navigation
    Gravity Forms for WPML

    I haven’t yet run into any major/unsolvable issues. When I started a dev site in wordpress’s italian admin install and then made english as the default language, I ran into some issues with string translation switching which language was showing as default. I would enter the translations under the appropriate language, but then on the front end, some italian pages would end up with the english phrases and vice versa. But a clean, fresh install fixed it, and haven’t had any problems since.

  21. Issues/Suggestions to Improve WPML
    • My biggest issue with WPML is that I cannot assigning pages for translation that have a status of pending or complete, etc. It would be FANTASTIC if I could reassign them regardless of status. I have tried changing the content and updating the pages, but for some reason they do not show up as needing translation or updating. (no I have not checked the box that says “Minor Edit – don’t update translation”)
    • My translators would like to be able to preview not only the English version, but also the current translation of the content
    • It would also save me a TREMENDOUS amount of time to be able to give a single translator access to ALL translatable content in their selected language.
    • No email alerts – I ask to receive them or send them and nothing happens.

    • Good points. Seems to me that some of the problems that you’re having are more bugs than weird issues. Certainly, emails are supposed to go out.

      We’ve had issues with WordPress issues until we switched from the local mail server to a proper mailing system. Now, we’re using Google for our emails and we connect to it via SMTP (there’s a plugin for that). Maybe this will get your emails going as well?

      As for not being able to send update jobs for translation when they are already complete – this should not be the case. Have you asked for help on this in our forum?

  23. Multilingual widgets, the ins and outs of string translation, workflow order. Some of the things I have been having problems with in the beginning.

  24. One more for language switching options. It has been a year or two since I created a site with WPML but have a new client wanting one in a few weeks, so plan to get back to it.

    Can I assume you will be notifying us by email of the training? And when is it planned for please? And is there a cost or is it free?

    Thanks,

  25. I would like to know what parts of a theme cannot be translated using the WPML plugin, like the footer, header or internal commands of the theme control panel.

    • It should all be translatable, but depends on how the theme is actually coded. Every string that’s wrapped in GetText (which is standard practice in WordPress) appears in WPML’s String Translation.