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.
I’m only using a small portion of WPML, but that portion is well worth the purchase price.
I would suggest that your training pay attention to getting beginners who want basic WPML functionality up and running in the shortest possible time. A screencast of how to turn the standard Twentyten or Twentyeleven theme into a functioning bilingual site without any theme hacking would rock.
I would also suggest that you make the introductory sections of your training available for free, in order to answer pre-purchase questions.
By the way, if you’d like an example of well-done CMS screencasts, I’ve a big fan of Ryan Irelan’s series of ExpressionEngine tutorials – a different platform but a good example of how to effectively use the medium: http://mijingo.com/installing-expressionengine
These are very helpful tips. A lot of the feedback that we’re getting is from people who’ve already built a good number of multilingual sites with WPML and it’s great to also get the feedback of newcomers. I’ll make sure to include that as well.
Hi there.
this is my one and only issue where i never found a solution:
assume i have a local translator working an a document.
Now for some reason this translator is no longer available (holidays, offline…)
But the page needs to be finished.
So i want to keep the translators current state of work and assign the page to another translator who is willing to jump in to finish the document.
But i can not do that, because the initial translator first needs to release the document. So i got stuck. I think that the only way to go is to delete the translated document and then figure out how to fix the Blog to get a new document started.
I believe there is a more clever way to do that… Please add this sort of workflow issues and how to fix them to your training .
I think that you’re right. We fully cleared the ‘normal’ path, but there might be some ‘problem’ cases that are not fully handled. We have it on our todo list and I’ll see that it doesn’t keep getting pushed back in priority. Otherwise, did you find the Translation Management module clear to work with?
Hi,
I’m bought Multilingual Blog. I want to see there function (String Translation?) to translate each home page description (like deyneko.com/ru/ or deyneko.com/fr/) not only in default language. I think Multilingual blog should have it with its price. In the other worlds Multilingual blog is “not complete” for normal functioning. During 1 year of using WPML before I used qTranslate I found that I no need lot of functions. When I had problems with WPML (lost translation connections) I found out that actually I no need it. So if French speaker found an information on my site in French – no need for him to switch to Russian etc. At present time I think to refuse to using WPML and install three WP with different languages + simple widget with links to two others WPs. I’ll make final decision in middle of summer. This is my point of view.
Amir,
If your plugins have got “hidden gems”, I’m sure that everyone would be glad to know them. But, if you are planning to train about your plugins without adding anything to the current (and well done) documentation, I think that it’s not necessary.
However, let me do a feature request: better compatibility between WPML, WordPress Multisite and the Domain Mapping plugin.
Keep the great work ;).
Regards,
—
David
Maybe hidden gems are a bit to dramatic, but I can assure you that there’s plenty stuff that WPML does and very few people are aware of. It’s a lot of work to read each and every page in the entire documentation. I was thinking that it would be nice to receive it as individual lessons that explain and demonstrate. It will mostly be based on the current documentation, but adapted to ‘lesson’ formats.
For WPML and Domain Mapping, have a look here:
http://wpml.org/documentation/essential-multilingual-plugins/multilingual-site-network-with-domain-mapping/
I’m using Woocommerce and WPML.
My needs are to be able to have the translations synchronized, so the stock is the same, but to be able to change the stock whenever I want and don’t loose the translations.
Currently I have my site in English. I’ve translated the product using the synchronization option so they have the same sku, stock, etc. Afterwards I changed the product description to another language. The stock and sku remains the same.
Now, the problem comes when I have to manually update the stock. The translation disappears. WPML synchronizes everything, incluiding the product description.
I don’t know i f I’m not using WPML correctly but I don’t see the point in synchronizing everything, that would be an exact copy for another language but in the original language.
I’ve posted this in the forum but didn’t receive responde.
Thanks and great work.
I’m not 100% sure why the synchronization isn’t doing that for you. We also had a few problems synchronizing custom fields for our own site and fixed a bug in that code. It might solve it for you (I hope). We’ll have a beta version in about a week. Let’s see if that solves it for you.
I installed this plugin for a client and now they’re not using it anymore. (The person who was in charge of it is gone now and the replacement dropped the ball) I would LOVE to roll this out to our other clients but haven’t had the time to spend figuring it out. A training on basics and more would be perfect.
thanks
Jimena
Glad to see that you guys are working more on training! 🙂
I’m a beginner in WPML, and am using it for two websites. The only thing that I really miss are tutorials (video or photo) to help someone like me.
WPML is set up, and the website is working, but I have no idea how and what I could improve. Will you publish the training on the website as well?
It would be nice to have an online source (in stead of emails) as you never know what you might need in the future. It is difficult for me to browse to the website as I would have no idea what to search for, just want to optimize my own WPML use.
Can’t wait for the training to start!
http://www.dailyblog.nl
http://www.ohsodutch.com
My plan was to create a series of tutorials and email them. These tutorials should definitely also be view-able via a browser and I just need to figure out the best way to do that. I can’t wait for that training to start as well. Just like you’re waiting to learn more, I’m eager to show off everything that WPML can do 🙂
I’m in the process of setting up my site and I find it difficult to know what to do right after installation. I did set WPML up on 2 different sites but everything crashed and I couldn’t find help and now I have to start all over.
Screencast tutorials that show how to get started step by step would be fantastic and if you could prepare them in a way that shows the order to proceed for simple set up and use of WPML to render one site totally bilingual. Right now it’s so confusing… how to go about just translating the “theme” defaults and which plug-ins do I really need and in what order to do the work. Screencast videos to learn the important basics properly would really be genius and reduce a lot of frustration. Do you have any idea when your tutorials will become available?
Thanks
Suzanne
How could one enroll?
Comment – What bothers me? Haven’t been able to install it using subdomains approach. No-one in your organization has been able to help me install it despite numerous support conversations. Unbelievable.
http://wpml.org/forums/topic/problems-setting-up-with-subdomains-step-by-step-with-examples-please/
I followed that thread and it looks like you received a response from your hosting company about what you need to do to implement it, but didn’t actually perform that last step. Without that last step on your site, different languages in domains is not going to work.
I’m subscribed to that thread now. If you post follow-up messages there, I will respond to them in the forum.
I would like to see tutorials that start from the very beginning. I’ve been using WPML on a site for a year and a half and am pretty sure I’m utilizing only a portion of the application’s potential. I would welcome the instruction. Do we have to sign up for these tutorials?
We’ll be sending these tutorials to all clients who are getting our newsletters. As with our other mailing (for clients) there’s always an opt-out and you can re-enable newsletters from without your WPML account.
Am liking WPML for my two language english / french site. I am using the popular “stiking” template from themeforest. I would like to know to create a two language toggle rather than the standard WPML multi-language switch. On the english page a link in the menu and footer says francais and similarly when in french mode there is a menu item and footer link that says english. I have researched this and cannot find a complete answer – for me to develop a complete understanding of how to customize wpml and the striking theme is out of the question. I would appreciate any help. thanks…..mark.
Sounds like you’re looking for a custom language switcher:
http://wpml.org/documentation/getting-started-guide/language-setup/custom-language-switcher/
This is already a pretty popular item here and I’ll be sure to include it.
I would like to see any of the most popular wordpress gallery plugins working with WPML
NextGen Gallery actually works fine with WPML. The author of NGG included the required code that lets you translate texts in albums and images.
I would like an easy way of adding tekst in several languages in theme files without having to create a diffrent template for each language.
Beeing used to qtranslate I could add something like:
<?php _e("German textDutch text"); ?>Tried text in multiple languages in WPML with string translations but that did not work.
So a training on this subject would be appreciated.
This is also high on our todo list. The code about would work if you include a textdomain (2nd argument). See this:
http://wpml.org/faq/language-setup/
Hello Amir,
I’m a very happy user of WPML. I like all features but there’s something missing in my opinion…
It would be nice to be able to translate the slug/permalink of a custom post type.
Imagine there’s a Custom Post Type called ‘News’. Typical urls would look like this in English: http://www.domain.com/en/news/post-title
Translating this into another language should read http://www.domain.com/fr/nouvelles/translated-post-title/
At the moment it’s impossible to translate the custom post type’s slug/name This could be very nice for fully translated sites. I commented about it once in the forum and you said it’s not yet possible?
That’s a good suggestion, we’re aware of it and we’d like that for our own sites as well.
The problem is, to do this, we would need to be a big hack on WordPress core, which we’re not looking to do. It’s impossible to translate custom post slugs because WordPress uses them to decode which type you’re accessing.
I’m glad I read that. I was just about to write a custom-plugin for our site that used custom post-types, but that’s going to be tough if you can’t translate the slugs.
Presumably the way around it is to create two custom post types, one called ‘News’ and the other called ‘Nouvelle’. Could you not persuade WPML to link two posts of a different type?
It’s an interesting suggestion to implement CPTs with different slugs, but I can’t promise that we’ll implement it right now. We’re pretty much booked with features for the next few weeks.
This would be very helpful for us, I’m sure to train the people editing the site. The things I’d like to see covered would be:
(1) I don’t need a video on configuration – that’s my job, and I know what I’m doing 🙂
(2) Something on the basics using WPML would be great. Ideally it would be two videos – one geared mainly at people writing new content in one language, and the other video aimed at those doing translation work.
(3) Another video on translating menus.
(4) We don’t use string translation, because we do all our plugin/theme translation using PoEdit. Personally, I think this is a better solution, because it means that if we set up other monolingual sites in the translated languages we have the .PO files ready to go. So a video on using POEdit would be helpful for many WPML users, I’m sure.
That would cover it for us, I think.
Thanks for the suggestions. Indeed, menu translation can be confusing and it deserves its training.
Hi
I’m using core.
I have a few problems with translation management on big sites so I’m not using it as much as I would like to.
I’m using media translation, and, depending on the website, sticky links, but not all the time.
I’d be particularly interested in :
– detailed step through for totally customized navigation (eg removing language names in the widget)
– setting up preferences for translation of custom taxonomies and custom content types. I’m somehow not always sure whether I should “copy” or “translate”
– how to simplify the dashboard for translators 🙂
There are some problems with moving through servers. Since translation data is stored inside several tables, sometimes pages “get lost” since they have no corrospending entries in WPML tables.
Also, there should be a documented way to move String Translations done to another server.
Training on keyboard shortcuts would be great as well. String Translation is very hard doing in large numbers with only a mouse. Should know a way doing that like in POEDIT (like CTRL+Down to move to the next string)
Good point. This is a bit advanced material, but we should also include server migration in our training. Many people need to move sites from development to production servers at some point in time.
We are using a small percentage of it.
Some suggestions:
– In the themes have the possibility of internationalize widgets
– Gettext support
Yup, these are already pretty high up on the training requests. Thanks for reminding us about it.
Hi,
We are using core, translation management, string translation and gravity multilingual. For a basic user, it is a bit difficult to understand how translation management works with string translation and where actually translate strings. If it is almost clear for posts and pages, it becomes foggy for menus, forms…
That’s true the dashboard is a bit complicated and mixes various steps into one or several sections without a kind of streamlined process. It mixes administration and translation management and makes the process difficult to understand for a basic user.
That being said, it is a great tool and your support is just wonderful by its commitment to deliver a solution.
Hi,
I’m using the translation management feature and the XLIFF export. However, there’s an issue with the HTML embedded in posts, which is not correctly interpreted by CAT tools. I don’t know whether this is a CAT tool issue rather than a WPML issue, but I would really like to get an answer on the forum…
I really like the initiative of having video tutorials and we (as Qabiria, my company) could even provide a few of them in Italian for our Italian audience (indipendently, on our site, I mean).
Keep up the good work
Marco Cevoli
I am only using the Multilingual CMS option. Didn’t actually know about the other features, but I will check them to see what this is about.
But as A Multilingual CMS it is more or less perfect for my needs.
Hello,
The guys from Sildervilla.com agreed to integrate WPML ! And they are really excited about it.
One of the WPML member should contact them on this page: support: http://slidervilla.com/support/topic/slider-and-wpml/#post-1833
One more thing:
WPML has problems with tags. When you translate an article into another language, the translated article will purge all of its tags if you amend the default article ( sorry it is a bit confusing).
For example: You write an article in english and translate it into french (you choose different tags for both articles). Then, for some reasons, you amend the english article. It will result in the french article being deprieved of all of its tags. This problem is present on all WPML versions.
Hello,
I use WPML but there is so many things I can’t translate such as my introduction box under the posts (it is in French but can’t make it in English too).
Also some of the widgets I can’t translates there titles.
Another thing is about the RSS. I don’t know if I can get seperate RSS feeds or not because I am using the same domain:
– http://www.gaijinjapan.org French version
– http://www.gaijinjapan.org/en/ English version
Sounds like the issue is with the default language. Try entering the widget titles in ENGLISH and then translating to French using WPML’s String Translation.
Yeah but some of them are already written in English and I can’t translate them in French. And if I do write them in English they will appear in English on the French part of my blog.
I am so happy with the plug in and delighted with the help you’ve given me as I’ve learned to use it. I am aware of a huge number of features I don’t yet use, and I’d like to know more. But what I can testify to is that each feature I’ve figured out how to use, has left me feeling even more contented I bought the plug in and then the String Translate Module. The advice about which themes are also compatible was a massive help too.
I also learn best from video walk throughs and real examples, I’d like to see some links to Why Use This Feature and How to Use This Feature in the help section in future, and if I can offer help, count me in!
Daniel